Check out You Have Broken The Internet for more fantastic photos of my hometown covered beneath mounds and mounds of snow. The east coast really dodged a bullet there, no?
Posts Tagged ‘Chicago’
Photo by Vivian Maier
Check out this remarkable story of a life’s work lost and found from the BBC (and based in my hometown, Chicago):
The photographs reveal teeming streets, children at play in an alley, couples captured in a sleepy embrace, the intricate latticework of an elevated train platform, a drunk smeared in filth.
The arresting, artfully framed scenes from the streets and byways of New York, Chicago and beyond seem alive with movement. And for years, they were probably seen by no-one but the solitary Chicago nanny and amateur photographer who shot them.
But now, two years after her death in a nursing home, Vivian Maier is finally being recognised for her talent after a lifetime of obscurity.
Her life’s work, hundreds of thousands of black and white and colour photographs, was locked away in an abandoned storage unit, only to be revealed to the world after her death.
Maier was born in New York City in 1926, but many details of her life remain a mystery.
She spent some of her formative years in France and when she moved to Chicago after World War II to work as a nanny, she spoke with a French accent that delighted her charges.
Years later, the children she looked after described her as a Mary Poppins-like figure who took them on wild adventures and showed them unusual things.
According to those who knew her, Maier was opinionated and incredibly private. She worked for one family in Chicago for 17 years and as they tell it, she neither made nor received a single telephone call the entire time.
Read the rest of the story here. You can see more photos from this recently discovered trove here: http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.
~ Martin Luther King, Jr.
I love this photo of Martin Luther King, Jr. because it reminds me of his humanity. King was not a saint. He was a man with a radical (yes, radical) vision and was deeply committed to social justice and eradicating injustice not just in the United States, but as it occurred throughout the global community. We do men and women like King a great disservice when we put them on a pedestal. Not only does it take the bite out of what they stood for and gave up their lives for, it also creates distance between them and us.
We think we are too ordinary. We think there is no way we can do the work that King and his contemporaries did. We think we have to perfect our diction first. We think we have to go to church every Sunday (or mosque or temple, etc.) first. Pull up our pants first. Get a job first. Make enough money first. Earn enough bona fides first. And so on and so forth.
But none of that really matters. What matters is being so deeply committed to real, effective, lasting change, that you are not afraid to put in the work to make that happen and, perhaps most importantly, you are not afraid of the consequences of that work.
And one does not need to be perfect to do any of those things.
I’ll leave you with a few more photos that illustrate King’s humanity …
1956 mugshot of a 27-year-old King, taken shortly after the Montgomery bus boycott
King with his father and son, 1963 Photo by Richard Avedon
The Kings leave court in Montgomery, Ala. after Dr. King was found guilty of conspiracy to boycott city buses.
Photo by Gene Herrick/Associated Press
Danielle Scruggs is a photographer and writer currently living and working in Washington, D.C., and Silver Spring, Md. Her work has been exhibited in Baltimore and Brooklyn and published by The Washington Post, Stop Smiling magazine, FILE magazine, and F-Stop Magazine. Scruggs holds an M.A. in Digital Arts from the Maryland Institute College of Art and a B.A. in Journalism from Howard University. She is still very much in love with Charm City, albeit from a distance.