Out this autumn, Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife, by Pamela Bannos, is a biography of the reclusive Chicago nanny who was posthumously revealed to be a master street photographer. Bannon argues that Maier "was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny". She also looks at the complex struggles over Maier's legacy. From a review by Luc Sante:
Vivian Maier was an ambitious and prolific photographer who conducted her work in the open but kept its results almost entirely to herself. No one has any idea why that is. We know about her work only by chance, and through cultural and economic circumstances specific to the early twenty-first century. Had her end come even a decade earlier, it is quite likely that her photographs would have been destroyed and her name relegated to a mere census entry and a dim memory in very few minds. Instead she has been propelled to posthumous fame, and fortune by proxy. She has attained that rarefied position by virtue of her talent, to be sure, but also because of the romance of serendipity as well as the singular opportunities afforded by the internet to certain kinds of beaverish promoters. Thus her story, as patiently and lucidly detailed by Pamela Bannos in her nearly forensic biography—which unties many knots and brings order to what was previously a chaotic welter of information and misinformation—moves along two timelines at once, before and after death, both of them labyrinthine and marked by passages of seemingly permanent obscurity....
Although we know that she possessed an extensive library of books on photography and monographs on photographers, we don’t know exactly when she decided to become a photographer, whether she ever had professional instruction in the medium, or what use, if any, she intended for her very large body of work. Although most of her employers were aware that she took pictures, since her Rolleiflex hung around her neck on nearly every trip out of the house, we don’t know why none ever saw more than a handful of shots, mostly pictures of their children or themselves. We don’t know why she eventually stopped printing or even developing her rolls, and cannot account for the disparity between the glory of the full frames she exposed and the relatively few prints she made from them, many of which, in the words of the photo historian Marvin Heiferman, are “often indifferently printed and cropped to extract the more obvious details from bigger and more complex pictures.” Not to mention that there is no overlap between the images for which she has become known posthumously and the ones she herself chose to print. We don’t know why she was so secretive, why she often used aliases when dealing with shopkeepers, or why she failed to cash thousands of dollars’ worth of income-tax refund checks....
Maier was a quick-witted street photographer with a vast range of curiosity and an ability to adapt swiftly to changing circumstances in the field. She was audacious, braving high perches and dense crowds and defying official barriers and behavioral conventions in pursuit of shots. Her baked-in reclusiveness may have assisted her in assuming the willed invisibility that is the street photographer’s secret weapon. She was clearly aware of developments in the art as they happened, so that her early pictures suggest the possible influence of such photographers as Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, Sid Grossman, and Leon Levinstein, and later on of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, William Klein, and Garry Winogrand. Unlike those photographers, however, she never benefited from the presence of a community of peers trading tips and insights and spurring one another on to greater goals and unexpected turns. Thus, even as she honed her magisterial gifts, she remained an eternal student, on the sidelines of her medium. Her faltering will to print or even develop her images also likely resulted from a lack of community, audience, dialogue, greater purpose. As she aged, her once-extensive repertoire of approaches narrowed to a series of stock maneuvers. A large percentage of her later pictures were of newspapers—stacked, spread, crumpled, tossed.
It's such a fascinating story that it can't help but resonate with us - above all for all those "we don't know"s. A woman, alone, in contrast with the camaraderie of all those ground-breaking mostly male photographers of the time.....a below-the stairs servant who took no commissions and sold nothing of her work - who, indeed, never discussed her work as far as we know, or showed it to anyone else. She was no unschooled primitive: according to the children she nannied she was a feminist and socialist with strong and intelligent opinions. She also delighted in taking sly self-portraits - in shop-windows, in mirrors. What, we long to know, was going on in her mind? How could she do all this with no social support and seemingly no interest in getting her work known? She must have realised how good she was. Was it really all about the joy of seeing and capturing, in Henri Cartier-Bresson's phrase, "the decisive moment"? But in what sense is that moment truly captured if you never do anything with the image afterwards?
We don't know. Perhaps she had faith that her work would be discovered one day. Perhaps she intended to do something with it all later, but that "later" never arrived, and time and the distractions of life got in the way. Or perhaps she didn't care.
I've featured her before - here, here and here.
These are from the Street Portfolio 4 at the Vivian Maier website run by John Maloof.
Armenian woman fighting on East 86th Street, September, 1956. New York
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