>>4453761It's literally one of the most natural ways to think about photography.
Vivian Maier was generally an uninspired photographer. None of her work was very good. She never got famous when she was alive not because she was a woman as much as the feminists would like to claim, but because her contemporaries would look at her work, say "that's nice," and move on.
Meanwhile Garry Winogrand was taking pictures that, well, I'm not going to write an essay. But his photos captured the imaginations of Americans in the same way The Great Gatsby did, with a slice-of-NYC-life, just touching on, but not too controversially, racial relations, feminism, etc. New Yorkers might've just said, "Yup, that's the Bronx zoo." But there were many an arguments at every small town diner late at night over the photo of a black and white woman together, about the affluence of NYC's nightclubs, etc.
But NOW Vivian Maier's photographs have a lot more intrigue, as they captured a broad swath of the daily life of Americans in that time period, that was ignored by other photographers. Whereas before the photos of kids provoked nothing more than "that's nice" from just about anyone she tried to show them to, now they provoke discussions of what it would've been like to be a kid, or a mother, or whatever in the 1950s-1970s.
Which, was kind of Vivian Maier's intent, it was an intent that was irrelevant and uninteresting for the time period.
But the vast majority of photos on Reddit don't have any intent beyond being horny, shilling products, and autistic "documentation".
