Their posthumous airing, and an ecstatic popular reception that began on the internet, has kept critics, lawyers and scholars busy.Ī biography by Pamela Bannos published in 2017 suggested that the ragtag assortment of men who had unearthed and to some extent profited from Maier’s photographs - buying and selling them at auction, organizing popular exhibits and producing books and documentaries about her - were presumptuous to frame her story, let alone lay claim to it. Despite recurring selfies, some in noirish shadow, Maier was in fact the anti-influencer: Her startling compositions were not only largely unshared and unsponsored during her lifetime - she made abortive attempts to start a postcard business - but almost entirely unseen. The ensuing record of her movement throughout the world - at least 140,000 negatives of landscapes, common folk, celebrities, children, animals and garbage - has more range and rigor than any influencer’s. Long before we were all carrying around those little wafers of pleasure and misery, Maier made constant companions of her Brownies, Leicas and Rolleiflexes. If a picture were still worth a thousand words, we’d know more than enough by now about Vivian Maier, the so-called photographer nanny whose vast trove of images was discovered piecemeal and not fully processed, in all senses of the word, after her death at 83 in 2009, just as the iPhone was going wide.
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