Square Images

I was really interested this morning to come across some photographs on the 'Guardian' arts website by a so far 'undiscovered' twentieth century photographer. Her name was Vivian Maier and she worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago, following her interest in taking street photographs on her days off. She died two years ago in poverty and obscurity. Now her collection of 100,000 negatives, which turned up in an auction, is impressing students of the history of photography and urban history. You can see some of her work here.

I guess, apart from the quality of the work, it caught my eye from two different perspectives. Firstly it is just such an absorbing record of twentieth century street life in American cities, you are led directly into the reality of 'downtown' in the 1950's, witness events without explanations. As a photographer of cities myself - I took more than 10,000 pictures of Chiba in the years I was walking my streets there - I love the sense of being parachuted into other urban places and times. These are just the kind of pictures I would have wanted to have taken myself if I had been there, then.

But the other thing that is so interesting about these images is that the are taken on old '120' roll film and so the pictures are square. I can't read the badge on her camera but I guess it is a battered Rolleiflex. In the 1960's I had the loan of one of these cameras for a while and it was just so different to use compared with modern 'SLR' kit. The square format - and the fact that you are looking at the image you are taking downwards on a small frosted glass screen - all contribute towards a sense of being utterly separate from the scene which you are recording. Also a 'square' format is now something that is strange to us, we are used to seeing the world recorded in a 'landscape' format and pictures of people in a 'portrait' format and it is easy to forget that these are just cultural filters, our eyes and brain don't really experience the world reduced to these conventional relationships/