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.
This story kind of reminds me of the time my younger sister discovered a bunch of photos, negatives and cameras abandoned in an empty house in her neighborhood. She basically stole them I guess (though nobody was around to claim them) and it appears most of the photos were taken in the early 80s in Nashville. Mostly just shots of the urban core of the city, but pretty cool to look at if you grew up there and could see how things have changed since then. From what we could tell he appeared to be a bus driver? So I guess he was an amateur photographer on the side or it was his hobby?
Anyhow, I wish I had some scans to share but in any case these photos are technically better and more interesting, having human subjects and all
UNLOCKING THE TRUTH “Kriss Kross this isn’t. Lock up your daughters, America: these sixth-grade metalheads from Flatbush, Brooklyn are on a mission to rock your socks off.”
i feel it
Here’s a bin of old videotapes at a used-media superstore. It’s a reminder of the days when new movies on VHS were priced for rental, not sell-through, and the home-video retail market was dominated by workout tapes, cheap cartoons, public-domain material, and whatever low-rent companies could license or steal from overseas. This was how a lot of us watched our first Jackie Chan films, on grubby transfers with untraceable titles; and how we caught up with anime series, and even how we saw some classics like Charade and The Stranger, on dirt-cheap tapes of dubious quality. There’s been a boom in nostalgia for vinyl LPs, but outside of feeling a pang at the sight of a VHS box, it’s hard to imagine anyone actively pining for a return to the days of tape-warp and cracked plastic shells. —Noel Murray
revolver ocelot is the biggest dork in history
cause he starts like this right
and he runs around being the biggest dork ever and meets this guy here
and then years later look who got a fucking mullet
but wait big boss has a pony tail now
and then ocelots like
ocelot thats not how you get a boy to like you
