Photos by Vivian Maier.
They’re mostly from Chicago, but she travelled widely.
What an eye.
Here is the collection I just looked through, Google her name (or follow the links from the Wiki page) for more pics.
Yep-the 1950’s were drab! I liked the one with the kid looking off the rooftop at the “Corona” cinema. The Films were “Raiders of the 7 Seas” ,and “The Magnetic Monster”-wonder what years those classics came out?
That one of the people behind the venetian blinds is frickin incredible. The figures appear as an interference pattern in the horizontal lines. I have never seen quite that effect before.
IMDB says 1953 for both, so that’s easily settled.
I don’t find the 50s “drab”; to me one of the things that stands out is how much more stylishly dressed the average person was then compared to now. Nobody wears sportswear, only little kids wear baseball caps, middle-aged people didn’t dress like overgrown children. I’m about as far from socially conservative as you can get, but style is style. In those terms, that era leaves our own for dead.
Thanks for sharing that, Shakester. That was a good hour I won’t count as wasted on the internet. Amazing images from an enigmatic observer. Her self-portrait with the circular mirror is brilliant.
How lovely that her former charges took care of her in her dotage. How incredible that these photographs were largely undeveloped rolls of film. So Vivian Maier never saw them herself. What an artiste!
The 50’s drab, ralph124c? Are you kidding?
The young’uns think that because everything was still black and white in the 50s.
I love that style of photography. In fact, a few months ago, Street Scene came to the Milwaukee Art Museum which featured a lot of photography just like this. It’s worth seeing if it comes near you.
I’ve just started looking through them, and haven’t finished; but the first photo grabs me. I was born in the '60s (The Space Age!) and I can still remember how quiet things were without the TV on all the time. The neighbourhood scene is a bit more lush than the one I lived in in San Diego, but there were trees along the street and my best friend’s yard was very shady. And his grandfather collected Hudsons, which had the shape of the car in the photo.
Hey, what’s this?
Is Grandma carrying heat?
There were so many chubby kids back then. I thought the way people talked there were no overweight children before 1990.
I often wonder if contemporary photographers spend much time learning B/W.
I noticed that too. Also, the number of kids who had dirty faces. You can also really tell who had money and who didn’t. Clothes were stained, worn out, handed down, and used up before they were let go. I’ve bookmarked this page, shared it on FB, and made one of the crowd shots my desktop.
Thank you, Shakester.
Amazing. Thank you for posting this.
Wow. She had an amazing eye. Her work is absolutely incredible. It’s a shame she never developed these – she could have published them and done quite well. I’m so glad they’re not lost forever!
ETA: I’m just gobsmacked at how incredibly talented a photographer she was. Her sense of perspective, composition and framing are breathtaking.
Fantastic! That Rolli isn’t a cheap camera and she really put it to good use.
What a window into the past. Does it seem like people had more character then or was it just the rough times that wore on the faces and bodies?
It’s not clear to me whether these photos were some of the ones that had already been developed, from negatives, or if they were made from the undeveloped film which would have been half a century old at this point, which seems hard to believe.
There’s also an official website.
From davidm’s link:
Thank you.
Not necessarily, at least not all the time.
BTW when you say ‘sportswear’, do you mean ‘outfits for exercising or for playing some kind of sport’? I’ve always understood sportswear to mean something quite different: semi-casual clothes less formal than suits or party/cocktail dresses, but more dressy than what people usually go around in today. The 1950s, IMO did have some pretty sharp looking items in this area.