In a street interview conducted by Egypt’s El Wady newspaper, this 12 year old proves that privileged Westerners should consider arming their children — not with credit cards, guns, and Ramones t-shirts, but with information about our changing world.
It’s funny, wanting to stand out. We desire individuality and to express ourselves uniquely, but we’re pleased when we discover we’re just like those we want to stand apart from. We enjoy learning that celebrities have wrinkles, blotchy skin, and one leg longer than the other. We gobble up captured private moments of public figures and we’re eager to learn how much in common we have with those whose fabulous lives we insist could never be ours. I can’t even imagine having anything in common with Paula Deen, but you get the idea…
Down here on earth and up the street on which my wife and I live, I smile when I hear my next-door neighbor drops his keys and mutters under his breath, still balancing things in his hands. I hear his daughter ask questions he either doesn’t have the answer to or has no patience to explain, and though I don’t have children myself, his impatience is gratifying. It’s not his exasperation that makes me root for him, but rather the certainty that I’d be likewise confounded. Soon the daughter will be older and bolder. Maybe she’ll hide his keys behind her back one afternoon and I’ll lean in to hear how it turns out.
In the meantime, like watching some vulgar, egomaniacal luminary who’s been stripped down to my level of hygiene and over-limit fees, overheard and superficial commonalities with my neighbors will have to do. Read more
For those unfamiliar with the Vivian Maier story, it’s a simple one that never changes. Vivian was a professional nanny who, in her off time, wandered around bad neighborhoods and metropolises snapping pictures of just about everyone from derelicts to fashionable women, cops, and lots of kids. Before she died in a Chicago nursing home in 2009, Maier had amassed over 120,000 images of strangers in streets, slums, and shadows. An extremely secretive woman, she never shared her activities, travels abroad, or any of her photos. With anyone. Not in fifty years of practicing street photography.
At the time of her passing, Maier was in possession of none of her work – not a single negative. This is to say, reel after reel of 8 and 16 mm film; personal writings and cassette tapes containing her voice recordings; personal observations on you-name-it; and seven hundred rolls of undeveloped color film. In 2007, it all had been forfeited to a storage company due to unpaid fees, for Vivian had begun this century almost destitute. She was powerless to stop the contents of the unit from being sold to a Chicago auction firm.
To those who knew her, or thought they did (namely, the grown children she’d cared for), she was a recluse, a hoarder, and a peculiar spirit. But to the many who now consider her one of the most prolific and talented street photographers in the history of the medium, she is an ambiguous monolith of isolation, genius, and resolve. Read more
