Vivian Maier: A source of inspiration

January 3, 2012

I was thrilled when one of our students sent us the information about photographer Vivian Meier. This was an American woman who was born in New York, grew up in France and later came back to Chicago, where she worked as a nanny for about 40 years.

The interesting part of her story is when you find out that she was a woman with a passion for photography but never took photography classes. She took her camera everywhere and took her photographs but never developed her rolls of film. I couldn't stop thinking how she didn't want to see the images she had taken? 

How could she live without developing her rolls of films? How could she not want to see the images she was taking? Did she really remember all her frames? Maybe she didn't. Maybe she was trying to be someone else? I don't know, but I do think that in today's digital world, that could be something almost impossible.

Through her self-portraits I could see she used a Hasselblad and a Rolleiflex camera. These cameras are called medium format cameras and are the type of cameras where you need to stop, see and make a decision. A bit different to today's digital photography.

We teach in our portrait photography course how to take self portraits and learn about portrait photography. We learn technical aspects of portrait photography and composition elements of portrait photography.