Write a few sentences that summarize the main ideas (visually and conceptually) of each influence and explaining your choice.

Vivian Maier was a nanny who had a passion for street photography. She kept it to herself, and as part of her mystique, only to became famous posthumously after a collector bought her undeveloped archive at a storage unit sale. She remains a mystery, with those who knew her calling her different names, with various spellings, conflicting accounts of her personality, and a general lack of knowledge of her upbringing and life experience. All that's left is her enormous body of work.

Her street photography is consistent in form, a precursor to the Instagram aesthetic: almost all of her work is in square format, black and white. The subject is usually in the center. What inspires me of her work is the way she captures everyday life in the streets of mid-century Chicago. Her subjects are everyday people; she used a top-view camera to capture people more candidly, and her photos show a range of emotion. There are subjects she spoke to and posed, while others are spontaneous and even blurry and out of focus.

I use her work as an influence in that I try to see the everyday world as a worth subject of photography. I like to find scenes that are mundane and capture them in a way that gives them an artistic angle. Her commitment to her work, and the fact that it was really a private endeavor, drives me to take as many photos as I can.