Another look at the pictures of the Chicago nanny and secret street photographer (previously) whose huge cache of photos came to light after her death in 2009. Apart from the odd one or two, I hadn't seen these before. Keep going and there are quite a few self-portraits as well - reflections in shop windows and the like. Considering she left behind some 100,000 photos, you have to think there's a lot more wonderful stuff yet to come.
What a great photographer she was - and what a refreshing contrast to others I can think of. Actual real people captured in all their various beauty and strangeness and squalor and glory by a woman with her eyes wide open to the world; not a bunch of tired stereotypes crammed into a pre-determined mould only to make some stale and utterly predictable political point, by a career photographer who knows exactly what the world should like well before he bothers to takes a peek at it - and of course knows just the kind of pre-digested pap the curators of today's galleries want to see hanging on their walls, so they can warm up all those old interrogatings and subversives and challengings that they learnt so well at art college.
OK. Enough already.
Comments