Vivian Meier

Vivian Meier – Taking a Stranger’s Portrait

Vivian Maier was an American street photographer born in New York City. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

Meier went out into the streets and took pictures of complete strangers – some who had posed for her and some that are natural.

	These pictures all seem to capture natural expressions of people in the  streets. Those who notice the camera don’t especially smile or pose as they probably would have done in more modern times.

 I like these images as they give an unbiased view of the olden times. Cameras were not as frequent as they are now so the some of the nonchalant expressions or actually genuine as they probably didn’t realise what Meier was doing. In my final portrait, I believe that neither of my subjects actually realised I was taking a photo of them. Luckily, I managed to capture a genuine smile on the student facing the camera which I think is the first thing you notice when you see the picture.

I decided to do my image in colour as although the black and white images work for Vivian Meier in her time; they are not a creative decision as colour cameras were very expensive. So I think a good reflection of natural images would have colour.