I am Junfeng Image, click "Follow" in the upper right, share photography dry goods for you every day, private message I reply to the number "01", send you a photography novice starter package.
On June 30th, the exhibition "In Search of Hidden Genius: Vivian Meier" organized by Today Art Museum officially came to a perfect end.
The exhibition fully presents Vivian Meier's most representative "selfie series" (83 works) and 9 super 8 mm video works, which have attracted the keen attention of many photography enthusiasts for three months.
▲Exhibition site (source official)
Vivian Meier, a nanny who lives in Chicago, has been walking the streets of the city for decades, photographing countless moments, leaving behind a variety of worldly changes, but also revealing her enigmatic traces of life. I believe that friends who love street photography have heard of this hidden genius photographer.
Vivian Meier
(February 1, 1926 - April 21, 2009)
#薇薇安 Meier's two-faced life
Vivian Meier is a nanny and a photographer who shakes the world with her lens. Born in the United States, he lived with his mother in France as a teenager and returned to the United States to live and work as an adult until his death in 2009. Since the 1950s, Vivian Meier has been a two-sided life of photography while working as a nanny.
She has always asked for very little from her employer, but she must ask for two when interviewing, one is to have enough space to fit the 200 suitcases she carries with her, vivian once said, her life has been in a suitcase full of negatives;
Second, as a person who pays great attention to privacy, she requires a closed and independent space, and the door needs to be locked, and outsiders are strictly prohibited from entering.
In her more than forty years of nanny career, she has traveled to several families and hidden in the streets, and forty years of perseverance have allowed her to record tens of thousands of precious works, recording the faces of all beings and the vicissitudes of time in that era.
▲ Vivian Meier's estate at auction
She made about 100,000 negatives in her lifetime, and even thousands of films were not developed. During her lifetime, her work was not known until she was discovered by a local historian, John Malouf, in 2007, that Vivian's photography was brought to life, and her story was published in major newspapers around the world.
"Talented photographer" Vivian
Vivian Meier was almost born for photography: from subject matter to composition, always ahead of her peers. She just truthfully records everything that happens around her, especially everything about ordinary people.
Hailed as a talented photographer, there is no exaggeration at all, vivian Meier has been trying to use a variety of shooting methods, the film production rate can be as high as 90%. In her earliest photographs, she is a confident and knowledgeable photographer.
Having shot more than 100,000 negatives in 40 years, she used every possible leisure to hang a Rolleiflex camera and wander the streets of the city like a searcher.
In Vivian Meier's work, the streets, strangers, children, and selfie portraits are the main subjects of photography, and all these images make the life that belonged to the "invisible" class of that era visible.
Vivian Meier photographs herself most often. She often looks at bathroom mirrors, glass windows, or records her silhouettes in the light, hoping to create a close connection with her subjects.
But in each selfie portrait, she rarely exudes emotion, and is always a look of displeasure, as if she is always reminding herself, without a trace, as a calm bystander to observe the world.
Like this one, her self-portrait is split in half by light and darkness, and shadows spread over the picture behind it, touching the equally isolated city streets and architectural landscapes.
As if a metaphor for her two-faced life: a mysterious nanny and a hermit-like artist
Although Vivian Meier likes to take portraits of people up close, she opens the viewfinder, winds, bows her head, focuses, presses the shutter – all of this is also secretive.
The subject only sees a strange woman standing in front of her looking down and not knowing what she is tinkering with, does not look at each other with a stunned look, does not disturb passers-by who are talking and laughing, and the way to record the human world from a low perspective on the waist flat viewfinder is so simple and happy.
Her shots are bold, sharp, sensitive and gentle, and the emotions conveyed from the photos can always jump out of the confines of time to impress the contemporary us, not just a cold photo.
For the outside world, there is no sense of intervention, neither want to go deep into it, nor do you want to go against the grain, just like two parallel lines in the same direction, maintaining a certain distance, not too much interference with the crowd, only recording the crowd.
Vivian Meier is a mysterious photographer who is one of the great contemporary street photographers in the United States. The great contrast between her two-sided life has left us with countless mysteries and endless topics.
Photography is objective, it will realistically record the moment in front of you. Photography must be subjective again, it is the photographer's point of view of the world and the perspective of the world.
"We're going to leave room for others. Like a wheel, you turn and reach the end, and others have the same opportunity to turn, to the end, and the cycle repeats. Others have their places. Under the sun, there is nothing new. — Vivian Meier
What kind of photographer do you like?
Welcome to leave a message in the comment area of [Junfeng Video].
Author: Junfeng Images, focusing on sharing practical skills of photography, Leica, and Hasselblad, paying attention to and privately sending me a reply to the number "01", sending you a beginner's gift package for photography novices.
ADDRESS
Junfeng Image Leica Hasselblad Camera Beijing Orson Park Store
▼