2 Photographers

Vivian Maier

Vivian Dorothy Maier was born on February 1, 1926. Vivian was the daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier. She grew up in New York, NY. She was an American street photographer whose work was not discovered and recognized until after her death. She worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago's North Shore, where she pursued photography on the side. In her lifetime, she took more than 150, 000 photos! During her lifetime, her photographs were unknown and unpublished and many of her negatives were never printed. Collectors found boxes of Maier's negatives and uploaded the images onto the internet. Since then, the photographs have been exhibited all over the world. Many of her photographs depict street scenes in Chicago and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. She died on April 21, 2009.

Richard Avedon

Richard Avedon was born on May 15, 1923. He was born in New York, NY to a Jewish family. His father, Jacob Avedon, was a Russian immigrant who started his own successful retail dress business on Fifth Avenue, and his mother Anna was from a family that owned a dress manufacturing business. Due to his parent's occupations and backgrounds, he was introduced to fashion at an early age. Avedon began working as an advertising photographer for a department store but was quickly endorsed by Alexey Brodovitch, who was the art director for a fashion magazine. After this, Richard created his own studio and later provided photos for magazines like Vogue and Life. He later became the lead photographer at Vogue and photographed most of the covers from 1973 to early 1988. According to the New York Times, "his fashion and portrait photographs helped define America's image of style, beauty, and culture for the last half-century".  Avedon died on October 1, 2004.