One of Ms Maiers lovely photographs
Yesterday, I linked to fellow Corner View-participant Woolfie over at Facebook, and through her discovered the marvellous body of work the hitherto unbeknownst street photographer Ms Vivian Maier left the world. (Sharing is the one thing FB is good for. You can find my fair amount of sharing here.)
What struck me in Ms Maiers early work, a vast expansion of snapshots showing exactly how life, even back in the Fifties, meanders between matter-of-fact, taken-by-surprise, wildly funny and a hint of WTF, is how skinny most people are, and how innocent they look.
It wouldn’t be fair to claim it is exactly the opposite these days, but I have wondered on many occasions how come teenage girls in our neck of the woods from one moment to the next seem to explode.
To them, reaching puberty must equal being in a car accident, with airbags popping up on all sides to protect them from bodily harm. Only, these airbags are here to stay, and once the fattened lassies realize this, their innocence is gone – or at least, that’s what I’d like to think on days that I have had it with the world. In all likelihood, they are masking their purity with that heavy-duty make-up they put on before dragging themselves to school, work or nowhere in particular.
I’ll not go as far as to implore them to implode, which is what I did in puberty, ending in me being borderline anorexic, anaemic and bereft of luxuriously bouncing breasts forever. But it does make me wonder. Fifty-odd years, a mere comma in one of the last sentences forming the paragraph on human life, and look what has happened…
As to the innocence – I am sure some of the unpretentiousness I am detecting in the black & white days long gone, was only skin deep. People always seem naïve in hindsight, that’s the infamous “looking back with what we know now” effect.
Let’s call it inexperienced – I know I was. Heck, I still am, though a certain degree of level-headed realism has offset most of my youthful guilelessness. Which is why I am so glad I am able to set that realism aside when delving into the flow – it has saved my soul from turning sour, just like I imagine Ms Maiers picturesque play helped her stave off the bitterness as times shifted and her point of origin faded…