Vivian was born in 1926 and never had a photography lesson in her life, yet is described as ‘One of America’s more insightful street photographers’. In fact, she worked as a Nanny for most of her life.
Her early work was mainly photographs taken in the USA, often depicting poverty and the less well off in society giving us a documentary history of the times. Many of her pictures showed us the importance of capturing a ‘moment in time’, something of a timely reminder for us to capture our very own ‘Moment in time’ as we find ourselves in these Covid times!
Later on Vivian travelled the world taking many photographs. She was described as a free spirit and a proud soul, a woman of strong personality, yet she never shared her amazing photographs, and quite by chance her enormous body of work, (over 100,000 negatives) were discovered when she failed to keep up payments on a storage locker, the collection of negatives were bought by three photography collectors.
Sadly her talent wasn’t recognised in her lifetime.
After this presentation Carol asked us to say which photographs we liked best, and why. A pleasant time spent discussing the various pictures, and many agreed on the favourites. An interesting, educational and worthwhile discussion.
Thank you Carol on bringing this amazing collection to our attention.
The second half of the evening Chenxi gave us an explanation of the much coveted ‘Rosebowl’ competition, and a run through of the chosen images.
There were 168 images submitted by members in the first round, these were whittled down to 48 in the second, and finally arriving at the 15 chosen for the first league match on 3rd November.
Congratulations to the following whose images were chosen.
- Steve Beckett – 3 images
- Kathy Chantler – 3 images
- David Gibbs – 2 images
- Brian Worley – 2 images
- Jan Dell – 1 image
- Nick Razey – 1image
- John Timbrell – 1image
- Barry Coxon – 1image
- Chenxi Ni – 1image
Special congratulations to Jan, Nick and Barry as this is the first time they have images picked for the Rosebowl.
And Thank you Chenxi for all your hard work putting this together.
Tami
Well Done Tami that’s a really interesting blog which picked out the highlights of the Vivian Maier story and summarised the Rosebowl procedure very well.
A good blog Tami. Well done. I thought it was a very interesting evening.