Back on the old sunrise trail again this morning.
I watched an excellent programme last night about the fascinating photographer Vivian Maier (Watch It Here) She had no recognition as a photographer during her lifetime and seemed not to seek recognition either. She was an amateur in the best possible sense of that word (from the French 'amour' - to love what you do) and she was a driven photographer from her very soul and made over 100,000 images which she simply stored away - sometimes never even printing the images.
Now her prints sell for thousands of dollars each. It makes me a bit uneasy that various people (perhaps well-meaning artistic people) are profiting from her art - probably against her will were she still alive.
It struck me how Vivian Maier chose her own path and she stuck to it. Most days she walked the streets of Chicago photographing what she saw despite having no outlet for her work, no audience and no acclaim. Noted street photographer Joel Meyerowitz said the following and I found a very moving resonance for myself in these words:
"You’re dealing with a disappearing moment it’s there and it’s gone and the only way that it’s recognised as having happened is you observing it, knowing it, and photographing it so you are the repository. I think that it’s great if you can make prints out of it and share this but at a certain point, if you’ve done it long enough, you don’t really have to. It’s for you. It’s just for you.”So I'm going to carry on photographing the same old beach and the same old castle and the same old sun as it shines across the world on each new day. I'll carry on building my archive of photographs for no good reason other than I cannot stop.
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