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| Vivian Maier, Armenian Woman Fighting on East 86th Street, September, 1956. New York, NY. |
I have sometimes thought that a woman’s nature is like a great house
full of rooms: there is the hall, through which everyone passes in going in and
out; the drawing room, where one receives formal visits; the sitting room,
where the members of the family come and go as they list; but beyond that, far
beyond, are other rooms, the handles of whose doors are perhaps never turned;
no one knows the way to them, no one knows whither they lead; and in the
innermost room, the holy of holies, the soul sits alone and waits for a
footstep that never comes.
– Edith Wharton, “The Fullness of
Life”, 1893
One molecule said yes to another
molecule and life was born.
Ever since some larger portions of
her far beyond 100,000 photographic exposures were unboxed in 2007, people have
been raving about the “two different lives” of Vivian Maier (1926–2009) and the
“mysteriousness” and “solitude” of this woman who was both a nanny and an
unknown artist with a rare talent for street photography, oh my. The petulant Maier
was, probably and respectfully, quite like the peculiar character Macabéa in
Clarice Lispector’s short novel The Hour
of the Star (1977), “incompetent for life”. Miss Maier was outwardly kooky but inwardly free.
In order to understand the nature
of her secret field of photography, why she actually chose to keep her work
private, we have to get into the definition of the word soliloquy: A dramatic or
literary form of discourse in which a character talks to himself or herself or
reveals his or her thoughts when alone or unaware of the presence of other
characters. One might also claim that many of the portraits that Maier took
of other people, people she did not know but surely related to, were to one
degree or another a representation or a reflection of how Maier looked at
herself.
“The people never smiles, they are
themselves, they deliver their own soul to her. I think that ordinary people
abandoned themselves to the pictures, to her thing,” says Anne Morin, Director
of diChroma Photography in Madrid – and the curator behind Vivian Maier in Her Own Hands at
Kulturhuset in Stockholm – to The
Stockholm Review. “Even when you see the pictures she took at the end of
the 1940s in France, everything is there. It’s the same portraits, exactly the
same framing – it is amazing because she had made clear in that time what was
the specificity of photography.”
“Vivian Maier represents an extreme
instance of posthumous discovery,” writes Geoff Dyer in Vivian Maier, Street Photographer. “It also says something of the
unknowable potential of all human beings.” She was eighty-one years old and
living in a nice place in Rogers Park in Chicago – paid for by two of her
former boys, and the first ever home of her own – when footsteps appeared
around her innermost room, the storage space for Maier’s entire photographic oeuvre.
Throughout her life, Maier was a law unto herself – until the day she could no
longer keep up the payments for storing the hundreds of boxes that suddenly
fell into the hands of unknowing bidders. The aforementioned book has a
foreword by John Maloof who purchased his initial portion of Maier’s work for
380 dollars: “The chain of events that this discovery set in motion has since
turned the world of street photography, as well as my life, upside down.”
There’s a lot of world to see in
Maier’s pictures, despite that she almost exclusively photographed the cities
of Chicago and New York with its sometimes posh but mostly often indigent citizens.
“I’ll be the first to honour the quality of the work,” says street photographer
Joel Meyerowitz in the BBC produced The
Vivian Maier Mystery (2013), the one to watch of the two documentaries that
are running at Kulturhuset’s park-bench cinemas inside the show. Meyerowitz is concerned
in this film “because we only see what the people who bought the suitcases
decided to edit, and what kind of editors are they? What would she have edited
out of this work and what would she have printed? How do any of us know who the
real Vivian Maier is?”
If you don’t really know how to prepare
Maier’s photographs you can always tout the baffling facets of her character instead,
like in Maloof’s Finding Vivian Maier
(2013), a documentary that – in the words of Malcolm Jones in The Daily Beast (April 24, 2014) –
“bullies us into accepting their greatness” (and he is right about that):
“Surely the people into whose hands the work has fallen have a right to publish
what they discovered, but when the artist herself is removed from the equation,
it becomes a very tricky business,” he argues. “Indeed, a very good film could
be made on the subject of who decides who is an artist or who isn’t, especially
in the neo-populist era of the web. Not so long ago, gallery owners,
collectors, and museum curators were the arbiters of greatness. Maier’s story
did an end run on all that. People saw the photographs online and went crazy,
and the photography world found itself playing catch up.” (When Maloof
presented his Maier pictures to MoMA, however, they didn’t want to have
anything do with them.)
The format of the pictures in Vivian Maier in Her Own Hands is the unedited
Rolleiflex square, though it is known that Maier used to edit the soupcon of
prints she made from her vast catalogue of negatives, and that they were always
smaller in size than the ones in the show. “For many people, the discovery of
her work has been one of the great unearthings of the age, although what she
would have made of the excavation is open to debate,” mulls the almost perfect
Anthony Lane in The New Yorker (March
31, 2014). “She might have been appalled by the fuss, or quietly gratified, or
both. Or she might just have told us to stop chattering, brush our teeth, and
go straight to bed.”
Yes, it’s the nanny who did the
Mary Poppins stuff together with the children – the ones who got her behind the
peculiarities and the acidic nature of her person. However, while people tend
to think of Poppins as the one in the Disney film, the “a spoonful of sugar”
nanny was another world from the nanny creations of both Vivian Maier and
Pamela Lyndon Travers: “The original Mary Poppins was not cheery at all. She
was tart and sharp, rude, plain and vain. That was her charm; that – and her
mystery,” as Valerie Lawson expresses in her biography on Travers. “Mary
Poppins is unique: lovable because of her mixture of magic and sternness, her
fantastic abilities hidden behind the façade of an extremely ordinary woman.”
Other kids called Maier “Bird Lady”.
It was something about the way this tall figure walked and how she always
overdid her French accent (she was born in the Bronx to a French mother) and
how she appeared in outmoded attire as part of some roguish espionage plan that
went on in her head. “Maier emanated both the look of an outsider and
protagonist,” writes Elizabeth Avedon in her book about Maier’s self-portraits
(once again edited by Maloof), portraits that may say something about the
photographer’s mental instability, her constant efforts to disguise herself,
her humour, the vision she had: “She seemed to embody photographic wisdom beyond
her knowledge – always composing, rarely emoting,” Avedon suggests. “I suppose
Vivian wasn’t interested I making portraits of herself as a whole, but rather a
glimpse or vantage point of the many sides that coexisted in one body.” Think
of cortisone junkie Ed Avery (James Mason) in Nicholas Ray’s fantastic Bigger Than Life (1956) as he regards
his fractured self in the cracked cabinet mirror.
“You know it’s bad when the French
pity you.” Michael Moore does actually say something of value in his Where to Invade Next (2015). In this
documentary, he also argues the US should put up signs – much like the Germans did
for the crimes they committed during the Holocaust – for the sordid things the
government is responsible for at home, especially soon after the war when a
majority of the poor lived in the cities. “Great Society liberals, their leader
[President Johnson] most of all, wore blinders in their pursuit of greatness,”
writes David Farber in The Age of Great
Dreams. “Torn out of time, shorn of context, even dimmed by fading memory,
images of the 1960s still haunt us, still anger us, still entrance us, still
puzzle us.” Maier’s numerous pictures of the misfortunates of New York and
Chicago pity the American Way. But she had a Dickensian understanding of the
greatness of every one she photographed.
James Baldwin expressed in his
essay “The Artist’s Struggle for Integrity” (1963) how “the poets (by which I
mean all artists) are finally the only people who know the truth about us.
Soldiers don’t. Statesmen don’t. Priests don’t. Union leaders don’t. Only
poets.” It says a lot about the time we live in that people, post the discovery
of her street photography, struggle so much with the basic fact that Maier
wasn’t interested in “sharing” her images. So she was a one-woman poet who
found her creative outlet in photography, a person who minded herself and who was
proud of her self-image as a mystery outcast in two cities full of outcasts.
That’s it.
Eric Fromm wrote in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness in
1972 that, “The situation of mankind today is too serious to permit us to
listen to demagogues – least of all demagogues who are attracted to destruction
– or even to the leaders who use only their brains and whose hearts have
hardened. Critical and radical thought will only bear fruit when it is blended
with the most precious quality man is endowed with – the love of life.” Joel
Meyerowitz calls street photography “an arms-length contact with somebody”.
Maier was, as we know, super private. But she understood the street codes – she
understood how to get these unknown somebodies into her Rolleiflex. It was some
kind of love for life in this. The rooms for the Maier show at Kulturhuset are
quite on the cheap side, but curator Anne Morin’s selection of Maier’s
photography is just touched by something extra.
Maier wanted the children she had
under her wings to be very aware of what was going on in the world. She took
them to avant-garde cinemas, she discussed things (though never photography), and
she had them explore the city, its unfamiliar monuments, she let them encounter
the unseen lives under the elevated railway. Anthony Lane describes how she used
to drag “her charges in tow. There were trips to slums and stockyards; a mother
once reprimanded her for exposing the children to the wrong part of town, but,
as far as Maier was concerned, there was no right part. There was just town,
and the lives that it held and broke.”
In one of her not so very sane home
recordings, Maier says that, “We have to make room for other people. It’s a
wheel – you get on, you go to the end, and someone else has the same
opportunity to go to the end, and so on, and somebody else takes their place.
There’s nothing new under the sun.” The pictures in the Vivian Maier in Her Own Hands exhibition show demolished Chicago
buildings and derelict human beings as if they were parts of the same occurrence,
under the same old sun. The central theme is people, people, people, and
sometimes her own shadow, sometimes her graphical exercises (she uncaged the
colours in 1976). Maier’s pictures of America are not as unforgiving as Robert
Frank’s. There is still that sense in here that the kidnapped mother gives her
young son Jack in Lenny Abrahamson’s Room
(2015):
“You are gonna love it.”
“What?”
“The
world.”
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| Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait, 1956. |
Vivian Maier in Her Own Hands at Kulturhuset in Stockholm through May 22,
2016.