In 2007, photographer John Maloof went to an auction house across the street from his Chicago home and bought a box of undeveloped film that had been abandoned in a storage locker. When he developed the negatives, he discovered that they contained a photographic gold mine left by a mysterious woman named Vivian Maier.
Vivian Maier - completely unknown at the time - had left a body of work comprising of more than 2,000 rolls of film, 3,000 printed photographs and 150,000 negatives, representing the photos she took from the 40s through the 70s. She took candid pictures of people, street life, and buildings in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, the American Southwest, and places as fara way as Manila, Bangkok, Beijing, Egypt and Italy.
But who was Vivian Maier? Maloof spent years reconstructing her work and life - and when he finally found her identity, Vivian died only days before he could reach her.
But in death, the very private Vivian Maier (friends have likened her to Mary Poppins - Maier was a nanny) has found fame. Thanks to Maloof, her work has found new fans from published books and exhibitions across the United States - and finally, a documentary is in the works.
Take a look at the trailer above, then view a selection of Maier's photographs over at the official website: Link | Finding Vivian Maier documentary official website
A few of her photographs of New York:
Undated, New York, NY
September, 1953, New York, NY
Armenian woman fighting, September, 1956, Lower East Side, NY
Sept, 1953, New York, NY
Undated, New York, NY
... Chicago:
May 16, 1957
May 27, 1970, Chicago, IL
August 22, 1956
... from her travels:
August, 1958, Churchill, Canada
Untitled, Undated
And finally, few self portraits:
Self Portrait, 1955
Untitled, Self Portrait
Untitled, Self Portrait
View more over at Vivian Maier's afficial website | Vivian Maier: Street Photographer Book - via The Jealous Curator
Comments (8)
I'm really looking forward to the documentary.
"Reader's Digest has an excerpt from another one of Frank's memoir"
memoir*s*
I will grant that it was a very creative way to get their minds working, but what might he have accomplished with students who already possessed the minimum skills expected of them?
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/20/books/20frank.html
McCourt began teaching at Ralph McKee in 1958, meaning this remembrance dates to circa 1961.
So, basically, it sounds like you're upset at the students' prior knowledge, which wasn't under his control (nor was it necessarily under the students'). Perhaps you think it's wrong that Mr. McCourt should have "had to backtrack" by actually teaching to the level of his students, just because that level isn't what you'd have expected them to know already. All the while you're condescendingly criticizing Mr. McCourt for "moving the goalpost closer," implying that he's giving up and letting them have it easy.
But it sounds to me like he was changing his approach when he saw it wasn't working. Sticking with an unsuccessful teaching style because you believe it's the best and therefore students should be able to do it - to me that would be giving up. Mr. McCourt was working with what he had, with the goal of reaching his students however he could.
***By the by, the article doesn't say the students couldn't write 200 words, it suggests that they were reluctant to. That might be an issue of motivation rather than lack of skill. We can't know for sure.
I'd have thought that everyone who knew McCourt would know that he was a teacher too - it's not like he ever kept quiet about it.
I'm unsure of what the story is here; an excerpt from his book is hardly breaking news, and this teaching method is practically textbook among English teachers (it has provided me with some of my best creative writing lessons). Maybe in the 70's it was new and unheard of, but now it's pretty old hat.
Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of McCourt's and I'm sure he was an incredible teacher, but this seems like scraping the barrel as far as stories from a man with such an incredible life go...
the dean was so entertained he walked us to class.