Running for Your Life: If the Greats Were With Us Thursday

There are times when you read something about a person who deserves a wider audience that it takes your breath away. That happened to me recently while reading my go-to journal, the London Review of Books, the Diary entry of Oct. 22, by Linda Matthews.

The photographer is one Vivian Maier. Steal a moment and read this piece, and wonder to yourself, who is our next Vivian Maier? How important are the observers who don’t draw attention to themselves, who see the things in ways we can’t possibly see?


DIARY

By Linda Matthews

The photographer Vivian Maier worked for me for three years in the early 1980s, though no one knew she was a photographer then. She was in her late fifties, I was in my late thirties. I had a big house in Chicago, a busy husband, two children of six and eight, and a five-month-old baby, and I wanted to go back to work. It seemed to me that a live-in nanny might simplify our lives and so when I saw her ad in the local paper, I phoned her.