Pamela Bannos

A nanny by trade, photographer Vivian Maier was also an "street" artist who left behind thousands of developed and undeveloped pictures in storage lockers when she died in 2009. She became something of an eBay sensation when collectors started auctioning off her works, which attracted the admiring attention of the photographic community. Art scholar Pamela Bannos has produced as complete a biography of the artist as we are likely to have, given the paucity of documentation about her life.

While this work may be valuable on a scholarly level, I didn't find it an enjoyable read. Admittedly, there is little we can know about Maier, but the text seems overly padded. The narrative is particularly heavy on descriptions of her travels and photographs (most of which are not included in the book). Even blog comment threads are recounted. There is also a lot of detail about the buying and selling of Maier's works through eBay auctions and websites. Maier doesn't emerge as much of a character in her own story, and her motivations and photographic obsessions (men sleeping outdoors, women in fancy hats) remain mysterious.

This book is not for the casual reader.… (meer)