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"Since her death in 2009, Vivian MAIER has become a photographic phenomenon. Her story - thousands of photo negatives and prints found in a storage locker and sold for pennies at auction - has stirred millions around the world.
Vivian MAIER was a painfully private woman who now speaks powerfully through the photographs she took only for herself. This new collection offers readers a chance to follow MAIER as she travels the world, including images of France, Italy, Malaysia, Yemen, Puerto Rico, and America.
These eye-to-eye portraits, published for the first time, are the single constant in her lifetime of photographic work.
MAIER is often cast as a quirky, antisocial character, moving on the outskirts of real connection. But these photographs show something more. Printed with the latest technology, the book utilizes a modified four-color process that produces images akin to traditional silver gelatin prints. Combined with 15u stochastic screening, Vivian MAIER's 96 photographs in this volume are spectacularly sharp, full-range black-and-white reproductions." (publisher's note, © CityFiles, 2014)
Book review:
"The unveiling of Vivian MAIER, the Chicago nanny and photographer whose entire life including her negatives and prints wound up in a storage auction and bought for a few hundred dollars, took the internet by storm.
A Kickstarter campaign for the first book of her work raised over 100,000 dollars in a matter of weeks. A blog run by John Maloof, who bought her possessions at the auction, quickly spread to larger outlets and news stories revealing MAIER as a talented woman who photographed seemingly daily in the streets of Chicago and New York.
The work was surprising in that there was a lot of it and that she had kept it completely a secret. Many of those families that she worked for remember her having her Rolliflex slung around her neck but never saw the photographs.
The story was told and retold many times and the center character besides Vivian MAIER herself was John Maloof, a real estate agent and part-time historian who won the auction that contained the boxes of over 30,000 negatives. What I hadn’t known was that Maloof was not the only buyer that day of MAIER’s estate – Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow also wound up with boxes of negatives. Maloof’s portion was the largest but eventually Prow sold 17,000 negatives to the Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein whose collection has been featured in two books, 'Vivien Maier: Out of the Shadows' and 'Vivien Maier: Eye to Eye' published by City Files Press.
Photo book 'Eye to Eye' presents about 200 images from the Goldstein collection and as the title suggests, all of the images chosen have the subject looking directly into the photographer’s lens.
As she was photographing, she was seeing just how close she could come into somebody’s face and make a picture of them. That tells me a lot about her. That tells me she could walk into the space of a total stranger and get them to accommodate her by being themselves. And generate this kind of moment where two presences were actually kind of vibrating together.' (Joel MEYEROWITZ in a documentary on Vivian MAIER)
'Eye to Eye' is well produced, if a bit formally stiff design and concept-wise. It feels like a well made book from a university press but with a finer printing. Being an edit made entirely of her subjects acknowledging her presence, unfortunately the tone of the book is mostly, well, just nice.
There are a handful of images that for this reviewer are very moving and meaningful without overt sentiment whereas the majority suffer from a saccharine sweetness that leaves me feeling nerved.
Vivian MAIER was a deeply secretive person so one can only guess which images she felt strongly towards, but from the little light that has been shed on her personality in essays and interviews with former employers, there was a darker and introspective side that I find difficult to match with this edit. In her best work, where the subject is unaware of her camera’s presence, there is a mixture of the profoundness of daily life flowing around her and a dynamic range of life’s experience.
'Eye to Eye' would have benefitted greatly from a little more emotionally diverse choosing on the part of the editors. Just looking into the eyes of another does not mean there will be anything profound revealed about that person and by default, the larger world that connects to the viewer." (© Jeffrey LADD, in: Hatje Cantz Fotoblog, Oct.,18th 2014)
"Since her death in 2009, Vivian MAIER has become a photographic phenomenon. Her story - thousands of photo negatives and prints found in a storage locker and sold for pennies at auction - has stirred millions around the world.
Vivian MAIER was a painfully private woman who now speaks powerfully through the photographs she took only for herself. This new collection offers readers a chance to follow MAIER as she travels the world, including images of France, Italy, Malaysia, Yemen, Puerto Rico, and America.
These eye-to-eye portraits, published for the first time, are the single constant in her lifetime of photographic work.
MAIER is often cast as a quirky, antisocial character, moving on the outskirts of real connection. But these photographs show something more. Printed with the latest technology, the book utilizes a modified four-color process that produces images akin to traditional silver gelatin prints. Combined with 15u stochastic screening, Vivian MAIER's 96 photographs in this volume are spectacularly sharp, full-range black-and-white reproductions." (publisher's note, © CityFiles, 2014)
Book review:
"The unveiling of Vivian MAIER, the Chicago nanny and photographer whose entire life including her negatives and prints wound up in a storage auction and bought for a few hundred dollars, took the internet by storm.
A Kickstarter campaign for the first book of her work raised over 100,000 dollars in a matter of weeks. A blog run by John Maloof, who bought her possessions at the auction, quickly spread to larger outlets and news stories revealing MAIER as a talented woman who photographed seemingly daily in the streets of Chicago and New York.
The work was surprising in that there was a lot of it and that she had kept it completely a secret. Many of those families that she worked for remember her having her Rolliflex slung around her neck but never saw the photographs.
The story was told and retold many times and the center character besides Vivian MAIER herself was John Maloof, a real estate agent and part-time historian who won the auction that contained the boxes of over 30,000 negatives. What I hadn’t known was that Maloof was not the only buyer that day of MAIER’s estate – Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow also wound up with boxes of negatives. Maloof’s portion was the largest but eventually Prow sold 17,000 negatives to the Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein whose collection has been featured in two books, 'Vivien Maier: Out of the Shadows' and 'Vivien Maier: Eye to Eye' published by City Files Press.
Photo book 'Eye to Eye' presents about 200 images from the Goldstein collection and as the title suggests, all of the images chosen have the subject looking directly into the photographer’s lens.
As she was photographing, she was seeing just how close she could come into somebody’s face and make a picture of them. That tells me a lot about her. That tells me she could walk into the space of a total stranger and get them to accommodate her by being themselves. And generate this kind of moment where two presences were actually kind of vibrating together.' (Joel MEYEROWITZ in a documentary on Vivian MAIER)
'Eye to Eye' is well produced, if a bit formally stiff design and concept-wise. It feels like a well made book from a university press but with a finer printing. Being an edit made entirely of her subjects acknowledging her presence, unfortunately the tone of the book is mostly, well, just nice.
There are a handful of images that for this reviewer are very moving and meaningful without overt sentiment whereas the majority suffer from a saccharine sweetness that leaves me feeling nerved.
Vivian MAIER was a deeply secretive person so one can only guess which images she felt strongly towards, but from the little light that has been shed on her personality in essays and interviews with former employers, there was a darker and introspective side that I find difficult to match with this edit. In her best work, where the subject is unaware of her camera’s presence, there is a mixture of the profoundness of daily life flowing around her and a dynamic range of life’s experience.
'Eye to Eye' would have benefitted greatly from a little more emotionally diverse choosing on the part of the editors. Just looking into the eyes of another does not mean there will be anything profound revealed about that person and by default, the larger world that connects to the viewer." (© Jeffrey LADD, in: Hatje Cantz Fotoblog, Oct.,18th 2014)
- Ed(s)/Author(s)
- Richard Cahen
- Book design
- Michael WILLIAMS
- Format
- HC with dust jacket, 21 x 23 x 2 cm., 207 pp., 96 b/w ills., text language: English