In the fall of 2013, the Center for Photography im. The Lumière Brothers photography exhibition by Vivian Maier was a great success. Photographer Vivian Maier’s discovery story is almost a detective story, which draws as much attention to her as her photographs. Vivian Maier’s story will always be a detective story, a fascinating and educational one. And we are grateful for her to fate and John Maloof.
Thank you to the Mayer Center for Photography. of the Lumière brothers
For photos provided for publication.
In 2007, a young Chicago area realtor, John Maloof, bought several boxes of old tapes at a local auction, hoping to find something among them to illustrate his book about suburban Chicago. There wasn’t much in those boxes, but after scanning some of the tapes, John realized the photos weren’t irrelevant, so he started posting them on his blog a little at a time.
Not many people noticed them there, but the more John scanned, the more he got carried away, realizing that he had found something remarkable. This was confirmed when the photos were published on Flickr: enthusiastic comments and exhibition offers poured in. The author’s name – Vivian Maier – wasn’t hard to figure out: it was signed on the envelopes and receipts from the manifests. He also managed to find information that Mayer was alive and in a nursing home, but for health reasons she could not receive frequent visitors.
John Maloof went no further, but more and more photos were posted, the public interest grew, and by 2009 it was clear that it would be good to get more information about the author. John “Googled” more and found a short obituary on the local newspaper website: Vivian Maier passed away two days ago. There was no one to ask questions now, except for a certain John, Lane and Matthew, who reported their grief over the passing of their “second mother,” “a wonderful person, a film critic and a wonderful photographer.”. John has nothing but this information and the contents of the boxes, which have not yet been fully dismantled. But in his rush to investigate, he found several clues that allowed him to piece together a biography of Vivian Maier. All we know of her is extracted from these boxes and the memories of a few people who knew her.
Vivian Maier was born in New York, but in her youth she also lived in France. In 1956 she arrived in Chicago and took a job as a nanny for the Gensburg family, who had three sons, John, Lane, and Matthew. They compared Mayer to Mary Poppins. An eccentric, reserved, austere girl in a big hat, baggy jacket and men’s boots who tells nothing about herself, meets no one, goes everywhere with a camera and takes a film a day, but shows no one pictures.
Loves to talk about film, politics and society, but suppresses any attempts to invade the personal space of the. But she is incredibly interesting: she brings a dead snake into the house, takes the boys to the cemetery, watches avant-garde movies with them, and arranges for the milkman to drive them to school in his van. The only valuable possessions she accumulated were film footage, amateur audio and video tapes and newspapers. Stacks of newspapers you can’t throw away, because each one has some necessary article you’ll want to reread someday.
In 1972, Vivian leaves the Gensburgs: the children are grown, they no longer need a nanny. Together with her huge archive, she moves from family to family in the following years. But what happens to single homeless nannies when they grow old? Some fly away with the wind, and some, fortunately, are found by their grateful caregivers, rent them an apartment and help them with money, and when the nannies themselves begin to need constant supervision, they are placed in a decent nursing home. John, Lane and Matthew Gensburg cared for their former nanny to the end. But her stuff seems to have ceased to interest anyone at all. The fees for storing the many boxes in the warehouse stopped coming in, and the warehouse sold them off at auction. Had John Maloof, the buyer, not been enthusiastic, the world would never have known about the photographer Vivian Maier.
She photographed everything around her that seemed interesting: people, incidents, objects, storefronts, merchandise, cars, trash, and her own reflections, that is, she was doing street photography. The difference between street photography and its close relatives, reportage and documentary, is that a street photographer has no specific task. He just walks around and shoots everything. What’s the charm of Vivian Maier? The same thing that attracts us to any good street photography: vivid characters, vivid observations, unexpected juxtapositions, irony, humor, paradoxes, light absurdity, and the beauty of everyday life, which we do not notice in life, but love in photography, because it gives value to trivial, unimportant, fleeting.
Vivian Maier is compared to almost every famous street photographer we know: Evans, Kertesch, Cartier-Bresson, Duano, Levitt, Modell, Frank, Friedlander, Winogrand, and others. Indeed, among tens of thousands of her photographs and we have not seen all of them – some of the films are still to be scanned one can find pictures “in the style” of any of them. Thousands of photos, and no author selection – that’s what we’re dealing with. The viewer admires Meyer’s photographs for obvious reasons: the general surge of interest in street photography, nostalgia, the author’s enigmatic figure and his undoubted talent. In the photographs, we see life in Chicago in the 1950s and 1970s. Colorful types, funny, strange or touching situations, a variety of costumes, details, points of view.
The images are clearly readable, it’s clear to the viewer exactly what to look at, who the main character is, and what’s going on. But the author’s selection and editing of the pictures means as much to history as the fact of taking them. Imagine if we suddenly found the raw archives of some nobody famous Henri Cartier-Bresson or Ansel Adams, in which everything is mixed up: what they selected for books and exhibitions, and what they would have thrown away without regret. It would be then that the Cartier-Bresson and Adams we know became classic photographers who helped shape twentieth-century visual culture? I don’t think so.
Critics speak differently about Mayer, and sometimes they have completely different opinions. It’s no surprise. We know nothing about her. As a photographer by vocation, she shot because she couldn’t not shoot. As a professional photographer, she doesn’t exist. She never exhibited, printed, sold, had no teachers, associates, students or viewers. We have no idea how much she knew about photography, whether she knew other photographers, whether she deliberately imitated someone, quoted or parodied others. Whether she was a master photographer or just talented, it’s hard to say. She told us too much – that is, nothing concrete or articulate – about her views of man, politics, society, the city, America, art and photography. It will never be part of the history of photography, only a notable feature, only a visual echo around iconic authors, views and concepts. We also don’t know if Vivian Maier wanted to tell us anything at all. Perhaps she was only shooting for herself and didn’t think of herself as a photographer.
Vivian Maier’s story will forever be a detective story – interesting and enlightening. But we still thank fate and John Maloof for it.
What was the biggest mystery or plot twist you encountered while reading Vivian Maier’s detective story?