One of the joys of a cross-country light-airplane trip is that I can fire up Netflix without having to watch Masha and the Bear. In the Fort Worth Marriott I was finally able to watch Finding Vivian Maier, about the street photographer whose work found an audience only after her death in 2009 (age 83).
The work is interesting of course. And folks my age will appreciate the silver halide darkroom scenes. But the movie is also interesting due to the challenge of reconstructing the life of a recently deceased person who had no spouse, no kids, and no close friends and family.
Another interesting angle is that taking care of children is supposed to be the hardest job in the world (Bill Burr and the Republicans handing out tax credits seem to agree on this), but Vivian Maier was able to work as a nanny while also working as a prolific street photographer (something had to give, though, and she apparently never had time to promote and market her work).
Standards for child care were apparently a lot lower back in the 1970s. Families that hired Maier knew scarcely anything about her background, e.g,. they were confused as to whether she was French or American. Maier would sometimes get angry or frustrated with kids and deal with them in ways that would be unacceptable today, e.g., abandoning them on a city street, hitting them, or force-feeding a 5-year-old girl.
Maier shared some things with Garry Winogrand, perhaps America’s best-known street photographer. Both were in questionable mental health. Both left thousands of rolls of exposed-but-not-developed film. [See Garry Winogrand show at the National Gallery of Art]
The movie requires more of an attention span than the iPhone generation can typically muster, but if you’re old enough to remember Ilford and Rolleiflex, I recommend the documentary.
Nowadays, no-one ever views their photos because the storage is free. When it cost money to take a picture, those exposures were getting developed.