What if one of the most important street photographers of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone?

Decades later in 2007, a Chicago real estate agent and historical hobbyist, John Maloof purchased a box of never-seen, never-developed film negatives of an unknown ‘amateur’ photographer for $380 at his local auction house.

 

John began developing his new collection of photographs, some 100,000 negatives in total, that had been abandoned in a storage locker in Chicago before they ended up at the auction house. It became clear these were no ordinary street snaps of 1950s & 60s Chicago and New York and so John embarked on a journey to find out who was behind the photographs and soon discovered her name: Vivien Maier.

 

More here

superwholocked-inthe-garrison:

forever reblog

(Source: britishteapower)

Grace Kelly in High Society (1956)

(Source: evilqueenregina)

swiczeniuk:

regibean:

When patients were committed to the Willard Asylum for the Insane in Upstate New York, they arrived with a suitcase packed with all of the possessions they thought they needed for their time inside.
Most never left. The mental hospital had an average stay of nearly 30 years. When patients died, they were buried in nameless graves across the street of the asylum. Their suitcases, with all their worldly possessions, were locked in an attic and forgotten.
In 1995, an employee of the mental hospital discovered the suitcases, 400 of them. They date from 1910 to 1960.
Now, photographer Jon Crispin is cataloging each suitcase and opening a window into the lives - and the minds - of the people deemed too unwell to be allowed in society.

This is fascinating and distressing. I wonder how many of those people were actually “unwell”, or whether it was just a reflection of what society considered unacceptable at the time.