It’s just freaking how my mind works.
A FB friend of mine “liked” a Christmas photo of Marlo Thomas, her husband Phil Donahue, and their family.
I’d thought I had heard a rumor about Mr. Donahue’s health, so I decided to read his biographical article on Wikipedia. Fortunately, there was no mention of any health problems, and I truly hope he is well.
While reading his Wikipedia article, there is mention of a person by the name of Vivian Maier, who at one time was employed as a nanny by Phil.
Due to some sad financial circumstances, as an elderly woman, she missed some payments on a storage locker and the contents were auctioned off a few years prior to her death at age 83 in 2009.
While the majority of her life was spent as a nanny, she apparently was also an accomplished photographer. Within the storage locker, she had left a treasure trove of film negatives – approximately 100,000 to 150,000 of them. Fortunately, three people attending the storage auction were photo collectors. They each bid and won portions of her storage locker, understanding the significance of what was there. One of those gentleman linked his blog to the area he set up on Flickr for her pictures, and of course, people then took notice:
After a lifetime of taking photographs, and apparently not even printing the majority of them, her photos are now being displayed in galleries, five books of her photographs have been published, as well as two film documentaries of her life have been created.
I think it’s an amazing story. If you want to read more, here is the Wikipedia link:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vivian_Maier
Two last thoughts:
First, as I mentioned, coming across this person and her interesting story was random, and I’m quite glad I did.
Secondly, my storage locker is number <*****>, on <******** road>, in the city of <**********>. Make sure my stuff gets printed and given to the Louvre in twenty or thirty years, ok? [I know I’ve taken more than 30-40k digital photos in the last ten years, and I truly have no clue how many photos I took using negative film in the preceding twenty-five years before joining the current digital “fad”.]
Sue Zielinski – this post is all your fault. Lol.
This is first of two posts – several months after writing the above post on FaceBook, I watched a documentary film of her life. I was so moved by this film, I was planning on writing another post. However, I wanted to first combine it with the above post, but of course, couldn’t find the original post on FB. The intent, now is to re-watch the film, and then comment on it. To say the least, the woman led a very bizarre, but also very interesting life. More to come soon with post #2.
