The Vivian Maier Cache

There has been some buzz on the Internet recently with the discovery of Vivian Maier. Vivian died earlier this year, and recently her work of about 40,000 negatives were purchased at auction by John Maloof who has been posting them at vivianmaier.com

The images that I’ve browsed though so far have been excellent, and I can’t wait for more to get posted. I highly recommend going to the blog to see photos.

With the discovery of these negatives fresh in my mind, I can’t help but relate back to a few ideas I wrote about earlier in the year.

The first was Philosophy from a tea bag where I took to heart a fortune from a fortune cookie that said The purpose of life is to do something that will live forever. With the discovery of Vivian’s negatives, and the images from them being viewed by a wide audience, I can’t help but believe that she has successfully achieved this purpose of life. I’m already convinced that if I never get famous doing photography during my lifetime, that I’d be cool knowing that someone else discovered all my work postmortem and got it into the eyes of many.

The second was my plea to future proof your photography. I can’t imagine that if the cache was in the form punch cards, or 8” floppies, that they would be as accessible as they are. I stick with film for its ease of archivability. The Maier negatives, along with the tale of Robert Capa’s missing briefcase only helps to confirm in my mind that I’ll be more likely to achieve the goal of doing something that will live forever by sticking with film.

External References

• Vivian Maier – Her Discovered Work
• Robert Capa’s Lost Negatives