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Finding Vivian Maier
- Director: John Maloof; Charlie Siskel
- Producer: John Maloof; Chris McKinley
CGiii Comment
Finding Vivian Maier was a little fortuitous for the filmmaker...or rather, he made it so.
Vivian was a [frumpy] spinster who worked as a nanny and took [literally] thousands of photographs...Maloof found these photographs by chance...and now, he wants to make money out of them...and, he's doing a pretty good job of it.
There is no doubting the impact that 'some' of these photographs have - but, when you take 100,000 photographs...surely, a few will be pretty damn good.
Is this a case of the Emperor's new clothes? To some, perhaps. To Maloof: he's milking his cash cow for all its worth...before it all goes sour. And, it will.
There's something not quite right about the whole story...self-serving, comes to mind.
Trailer...
The(ir) Blurb...
Real estate agent John Maloof explains how a trip to a local auction house, in search for old pictures to use for a history book about his neighborhood, resulted in him bidding and winning a box full of old negatives. John goes through the massive quantity of negatives, describes how impressed he is by the quality of the images, becomes quickly determined they are not reverent to his project and just puts them away. That could have very likely had been the end of the story, if the power of the images had not pushed him to fall in love with photography. John confides that his photo hobby quickly motivated him to set up a darkroom and devote large amounts of time shooting. As he learned more about photography, he recognized that those negatives he had bought, then stored, were the work of a real master. In an attempt to confirm his suspicion, he selected about 100 images and put them online with the hope that the feedback would confirm his judgement as to the strength of the images.