The first definitive monograph of color photographs by American street photographer Vivian Maier.
Photographer Vivian Maier's allure endures even though many details of her life continue to remain a mystery. Her story-the secretive nanny-photographer who became a pioneer photographer-has only been pieced together from the thousands of images she made and the handful of facts that have surfaced about her life. Vivian Maier: The Color Work is the largest and most highly curated published collection of Maier's full-color photographs to date.
With a foreword by world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by curator Colin Westerbeck, this definitive volume sheds light on the nature of Maier's color images, examining them within the context of her black-and-white work as well as the images of street photographers with whom she clearly had kinship, like Eugene Atget and Lee Friedlander. With more than 150 color photographs, most of which have never been published in book form, this collection of images deepens our understanding of Maier, as its immediacy demonstrates how keen she was to record and present her interpretation of the world around her.
This monograph forms an introduction to the major themes and the key images of American photographer Joel Meyerowitz, illustrated with 55 chronologically-presented images that offer a fresh insight into his career.
An introductory essay by Colin Westerbeck discusses Meyerowitz's life and work and places him both in the context of his time and within the history of photography. Born in 1938 in New York City, Meyerowitz went to Ohio to study painting and medical drawing at the State University but moved back to New York to work in advertising as an art director-designer.
He then started to take photographs, leaving his job to concentrate on his new career. Shooting film in black-and-white, he travelled around the United States for three months after which he was offered a Guggenheim Scholarship to take pictures on the theme of 'leisure time'.
It is as an early advocate of colour photography that Meyerowitz has had the greatest influence, for he was instrumental in changing the attitude toward the use of colour from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance.
His subject matter evolved from incidents on city streets shot with a small 35 mm camera to the large format field photograph. Architecture, light and space - particularly at Cape Cod - acquired a new interest for him. After the destruction of the World Trade Center in New York, he was the only photographer granted unimpeded access to Ground Zero where he systematically documented the work of demolition and excavation, rescue and recovery. He has been awarded the title Photographer of the Year by the Friends of Photography, San Francisco. His work is in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, both in New York and he has been exhibited and published worldwide, for many years.
