Street Photography

The video below explains the inspiration for this project. This one ended up being my favorite because I got to document people going about their daily lives and although simple, every single photo is beautiful to me, just as Vivian Maier's are. 

Throughout my independent study, I continuously referred back to the work of Vivian Maier, a Chicago nanny who captured the essence of everyday life in her photos. While street photography may seem simple, it is, in my opinion, the most important form of photography because it documents people living their lives. In a world where most photos are now staged and planned out, it is refreshing to look at candid photos of families, couples, friends, and everything else. Vivian Maier executed this technique perfectly and as a result, inspired me to try and do the same. Her photos, which filled me with nostalgia for a period that I did not even live in, were set in Chicago. Wanting to capture the feeling that her photos provided me with, I decided to take the pictures for this project in downtown LaGrange, a beautiful city with a simple and old-fashioned elegance. When you look at my photos, I hope you feel as I did when I first examined Vivian's and yearn to know more about the people in them. Each one of them has a life just as complex as your own, a concept that is strange yet oddly comforting to learn. While I had fun stalking the people of LaGrange in order to mimic the work of Vivian Maier, I hope you look beyond the black and white simplicity and even the whimsy in order to see that life is happening all around us. Instead of being glued to our screens, as many of the subjects are in my photos, I hope you go out and look around so that you can realize how beautiful even the most simple things are. Before this project, I never gave a passing family a second thought or an elderly couple a double take but now, I'm able to look around me and realize how beautiful and spontaneous life, not just my own but everyone's, truly is. To pay tribute to Maier, my street photography photos do not have titles. Her photos were only shown to the world after her death which means that she was not able to label the pictures in order to sway the viewer's opinion. As a result, I have decided to leave my photos nameless in order to enable to viewer to appreciate the photo they are looking at. Instead of trying to find a hidden meaning, come up with your own.