Vivian Maier Final Reflection

• Overall, I found Vivian Maier’s work to be very interesting. She was very daring and didn’t care what she took, just that she took it. She photographed anything and everything in the city streets, from stores, to homeless people, to people walking on the sidewalks, to dead animals, to live animals, whatever she saw, she photographed. Many people may have found it odd that she took pictures of strangers, but personally, I think that it was a new form of art that she took on and decided to work with. All of her worked expressed the world around us in a new way that no one had ever seen before and what she took showed every part of it. And while her mental illness was a tragedy, it was also the spark for her art. She seemed in my opinion, to hide inside of herself. And as the film showed, she refused to show any of her photos to anyone. Part of me also thinks about if her mental illness was the reason for her photographs. She faced conflicts in her life and wanted to show the world the conflicts of life everyone faced. The photo I included was of a policeman with another person. I like this photo because it showed how Vivian Maier was fearless. She got close to the conflict, never asking if she could take a photo of the moment, she just took it. I also like how it again, relates back to her mental illness and conflict and how she wanted to photograph conflict. Overall, this photo was great at capturing a conflict in the moment which we don’t do much of today because of the conflicts with photographing random people, but not Vivian Maier, she just walked up to the moment, and captured it in a photo.