Vivian Maier, Out of the shadows

About a week ago I finally got Richard Cahan and Michael Williams' book "Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows" from the library, after Kendall introduced her to us many weeks ago when the show was in Portland. Tonight my friend Mike and I attended the exhibit in Seattle at the Photo Center NW and heard the lecture given by Richard, and the collector of these photos, Jeffrey Goldstein. So I had studied these pictures ---and was totally surprised to see so many of them taken in Wilmette Illinois , where I grew up! Vivian was a nanny in the northern "white bread" suberbs of Chicago from 1955 thru the 70s. - there is a picture of the movie theater where I saw my first movies as a kid, there is a whole section (one out of 9 "journeys" organized in the book to try to tell her story) of Wilmette beach where I spent many hours as a kid and teenager. Maybe I even saw her!??? Now that's weird to think about. She would head to Chicago on the train after the kids were in School --many familiar images of that era.
Richard Cahan is a very personable Chicago journalist and story teller who came up to us before the lecture and introduced himself. (No we didn't buy the book or have him autograph it..) Jeffrey is a collector who bought a portion (16000!) of the negatives from the guy who bought a third of the lot at auction when they were found in a storage unit after her death in 2009. There are websites with lots of information about this "mysterious", "substantial" and "odd" woman who never showed her photographs to anyone, so I won't go on and on about her life...but you can learn more

Here is the one about this book.

Here is the site for the previous book by another of the purchasers of her work at auction, John Maloof John started off by selling some prints on ebay!

It was a lively talk full of antidotes and stories from their research of all the people that might have known her, in Chicago, NY and France where she lived with her mother for a while. When they went to the little town in France so many of the "kids" she photographed came to meet them --hers were the only photos they would have of their childhood in 1949.

I was hoping I'd get an epiphany about this whole Street Photography genre. Well, I'm closer, but what I did realize is that these photos were her DIARY, ---they are about ordinary things in her life, and very accessible and that I can relate to. And there was a photojournalist part, documenting important events. And she had a great eye for composition!