Month: November 2020

Five years ago, to my surprise and that of everyone else, including my husband who used to joke that I was a ‘folk-photographer’, a lot of snaps I had taken of him – mostly looking at buildings – were exhibited at the architectural school where he had been teaching and, not much later, and more surprisingly still, in a gallery in Rome.

It seems there is a category of photographers called Street Photographers, and that I counted among them.  Worlds away in skill and subject (I did not have the nerve to photograph grown-up people), I nevertheless found myself in the same category as ex-nanny and one of the greatest of all street photographers, Vivian Maier.

The film about Maier*, made by the young man who came across crates of her abandoned work in an auction sale, is a joy on two counts: because it allows us to see a lot of her astonishing photographs, and because her life is as strange and unsettling as that of a character in a Ruth Rendell novel.  Tall, plain, stiff (unable to unbend, except with children), this nanny-from-who-knows-where moved from one kindly middle-class family to another, with her ever-increasing number of suitcases and boxes, all hidden from view by her insistence on having a lock on the door of her room.

None of her charges came to harm.  Many have good memories of her.  And all of them will have been present when some of her greatest pictures were taken.    As for the boxes, it was not until young John Maloof – thinking he might find something useful to illustrate a paper on local history – put in a bid and took them home, that their contents were revealed.

It was seeing this marvellous film that made me go back to my own heaps of photos, mostly taken before DoublePrint went out of business and I had to go digital.  Almost all, I have now  thrown out.  But here are a few for which I have a lamentable fondness.

*Finding Vivian Maier:  written, directed and produced by John Maloof

My husband’s ‘take’ on Vivian Maier can be found here.