Carnegie Hall’s Fall Film Series continues with the showing of Finding Vivian Maier on Monday, Oct. 13 at 7 p.m. This intriguing documentary shuttles from New York to France to Chicago as it traces the life story of the late Vivian Maier, a career nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs has earned her a posthumous reputation as one of America’s most accomplished and insightful street photographers.
Vivian Maier (Feb. 1, 1926 – Apr. 21, 2009) was born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure, however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the 20th century.
In Finding Vivian Maier, Maloof teams with producer Charlie Siskel to discover the world through Vivian Maier’s eyes. Maier was an inveterate wanderer and self-taught photographer, favoring a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera, with an uncanny ability to get close to people from all walks of life. Her artful and comic eye calls to mind the photography of Berenice Abbott and Weegee.
Carnegie’s Film Series is presented at the Lewis Theatre on Court Street in historic downtown Lewisburg. Admission is $8 per person at the door. Films are shown the second Monday of each month, September through November. For more information on this or future films, visit www.carnegiehallwv.org.
The Film Series is presented with financial assistance from the WV Division of Culture and History, and the National Endowment for the Arts, with approval from the WV Commission on the Arts and the following visual arts sponsors: Paul and Ann Moran and Harvey and Naomi Cohen.
