Three Inspirational Film Photographers

Film Photographers Who Inspire

Today, I wanted to share some of my favorite photographers who used film to tell unique stories and inspire my own work.

Robert Frank

Robert Frank was the first film photographer I ever studied. Born in Switzerland, Frank started studying photography at a young age in order to escape the confines of his business-oriented family. He moved to the United States in 1947, where he picked up a job as a fashion photographer for Harper's Bazaar in New York City. At first, he was very optimistic about his new life in America, but quickly found that it was not all he chalked it up to be. He loathed the lack of creative control he had working for publications, and began to confront the fast-paced, money-hungry attitude of American capitalism. Frank's perspective on the U.S. changed from optimistic to bleak and lonely, an attitude that is very clear in his later work.

Frank received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1955, which gave him the opportunity to get out of New York and travel the states. It was during this time that he shot photographs for his most famous work, The Americans. Traveling to different communities over a span of two years, Frank documented the reality of American race and class relations after World War II. Shot in an unconventional journalistic style, many of the images are dark, blurred, and use unusual cropping. The book creates dissonance between the overwhelming optimism and pride in 1950s American culture and the underlying loneliness and bleakness felt by many citizens. At first, Frank had trouble finding an American publisher, so the book was first published in France. Popular Photography, a photo and art magazine, described his images having "meaningless blur, grain, muddy exposures, drunken horizons and general sloppiness." Sales were poor at first, but the book gained notoriety and inspired many other artists over time. Now, it is revered as the 
Frank's most defining work and one of the most influential photographic works of the 20th century. 

What I love about Robert Frank's work is his knack for capturing images at the perfect moment. He focused on moments that have emotion and tell stories in every image instead of taking calculated perfectly executed shots. Take this picture of people sitting on a bus, for example (below). The photo says a lot about the American class system in the 1950s-- the white man sits in the front, the woman behind him, then the kids, then the black man and woman. All of the emotions of the riders are beautifully captured, as it seems they're in between their own thoughts and realizing they're being photographed. 

Diane Arbus 

Diane Arbus was best known for her photographs of marginalized groups. Starting her artistic career in the 1940s, Arbus started a photo company with her husband Allan Arbus, where she worked in creative direction. The two of them contributed to several prestigious fashion publications, until Diane got sick of her role of direction and the fashion industry altogether. She took to the New York streets with a 35mm camera and started to photograph strangers, drawn to "unconventional" types like little people, transgender, nudists, and circus performers.

Arbus suffered from depression throughout her life and eventually committed suicide in 1971. Her work continued to be shown throughout the world, and her book, Diane Arbus: An Aperture Monograph, became the best-selling photography monograph of all time. 

Arbus' work is truly one-of-a-kind. She was one of the first photographers to take such honest portraits of people who were outcasts from society, and her photos have such a peculiar feel to them.

Vivian Maier

What's interesting about Vivian Maier is that no one really knew about her work in photography until years after her death. For this reason, she's somewhat of a mystery -- it's taken years for information to surface about her life. Thankfully, John Maloof, who purchased much of her film archives during an art auction, spent years finding relatives and friends to uncover more details about who she was. 

Born in New York City, Maier spent some of her youth in France and then worked in Chicago as a nanny and caregiver for most of her life. In her leisure, however, Maier ventured into the art of photography. Consistently taking photographs over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave behind over 100,000 negatives. While her photographs have compelled viewers around the world since being brought to the public eye there is much that remains unknown about the enigmatic woman behind the lens.

Sometime in 1949, while still in France, Maier began making her first photographs with a modest Kodak Brownie– an amateur camera with only one shutter speed, no focus control, and no aperture dial. In 1951, she returned from France alone and purchased a Rolleiflex camera the following year. In 1956, she moved to the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, where a family employed her as a nanny for their three boys. She enjoyed the luxury of a darkroom as well as a private bathroom, enabling her to process prints and develop her own rolls of black and white film. As the children entered adulthood, Maier had to seek other employment, forcing her to abandon developing her own film. 

Moving from family to family thereafter, her rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to collect.

It was around this time that Maier decided to switch to color photography. Her subject matter shifted away from people to found objects, newspapers, and graffiti. In the 1980s, financial stress and lack of stability once again put Maier’s processing on hold, and the undeveloped color rolls began to accumulate. Sometime between the late 1990s and the first years of the new millennium, Maier put down her camera and stored her belongings while she tried to stay afloat. She bounced from homelessness to a small studio apartment, which a family she used to work for helped pay the rent. With meager means, the photographs in storage became lost memories until 2007, when they were sold off due to non-payment of rent. In 2008, Maier’s health began to deteriorate after she fell on a patch of ice, forcing her into a nursing home. She never made a full recovery, leaving behind an immense archive of work when she died in 2009.

In 2007, the contents of Maier’s storage space were purchased by several buyers at auction, including John Maloof, who has since dedicated himself to establishing her legacy. While he was unable to connect with Maier in her lifetime, Maloof shared a selection of Maier’s photographs online in 2009 and was met with “viral” interest. Compelled to learn more about the woman behind the lens, Maloof began to investigate the life and work of Maier, culminating in the Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier. Since the discovery of her work, Maier’s photographs have the subject of several publications and have been exhibited at major institutions throughout the world.

I love the mystery of Vivian Maier as much as I love her photos. She took an interesting collection of self-portraits, and her street photography speaks volumes for the amount of natural talent she had with a camera in her hands.

I love the mystery of Vivian Maier as much as I love her photos. She took an interesting collection of self-portraits, and her street photography speaks volumes for the amount of natural talent she had with a camera in her hands.