At night I am so tired that I cannot do anything other than immerse my eyes in trees and shrubs. I happened to think of how in the south it was not unusual for the lord of the manor to have two families, the real family in the big house and then a small house on the grounds where the illegitimate light-brown children he’d had with the black nanny lived (with her). The white mistress often turned a blind eye to it, better an arrangement like that than having her husband running in and out of bordellos, from which he might return home with a nasty disease that she also got into the bargain. In addition, it was tradition at the time on large plantations for the owners to have free access to their slaves’ nether regions.
‘Mrs Maier …’
‘No, Miss Maier, and proud of it.’
Mr Marsh
I am reminded of a general setting off to do battle, leading a campaign, when I see her leave with the kids in the morning. Order reigns. And discipline. Even Paul sitting in his buggy appears to have understood that something important is going to happen and there are no grounds for protest. She has Raymond pushing the stroller, and she walks in front, her arms swinging like she’s doing drills.
That it is the woman with the ridiculous amount of belongings in a ridiculous chaos of tubs and boxes who comes marching along with my wild sons in a row, I have a hard time understanding. She is a French Jew, and we are allowed to call her Vivienne.
We have had to reinforce the ceiling above the clinic with a steel girder because it started to buckle, and I had nightmares of it collapsing on top of me and the patient I happened to be treating in that moment.
Mrs Marsh
Today I bumped into Vivienne at the supermarket, where she was walking around with a tape recorder trying to get people to comment on Watergate. She also approached me but I was totally confused. ‘But you must have an opinion about it,’ she kept saying. ‘Make a statement.’ People looked at one another and definitely regarded her as somewhat peculiar.
Vivienne
This is my nest, this is my safe place, though I may soon have problems getting in here. Mr Marsh has reinforced the ceiling without complaint – he would hardly want me landing on the lap of his patient while he stands poking and prodding in the mouth of the person in question. (Even though at long last there would be a little of Mary Poppins about me, but she probably floats rather than crashes.)
I cut across the lawn from the main house, which in truth could be called a home, to the smaller house with the clinic and my nest on the first floor. But being surrounded by gleaming Cuban mahogany and Chinese objects with spouts and handles does not make a person less scared in idle moments. Mrs Marsh in any case cannot sit still.
I prefer this arrangement over a room in the main house. The walk across the lawn marks a space, a new chapter, a page turned, between the order and prosperity and that which is mine. All the same, today I wrote my name on a piece of cardboard and put it on the silver platter, against the silver edge, I let it rest there for a moment and dreamed of having a tray brought to my bed, of having coffee from the silver pot. But I no longer sleep in the bed, which is stacked full of papers, so I lie on the floor.
As often as not, someone loses a shoe or throws it away, what do I know. Today I photographed such a shoe, a single woman’s, on the path down to the station. I imagined violence, that the woman had been on a wild flight from a pursuer and had lost her shoe. Only when I had it in the box, did I consider the shoe’s singleness like my own, but that was silly, because the shoe’s singleness presupposes an identical one somewhere else, for example still on the foot racing off at breakneck speed, whereas my own singleness does not.
Narrator
I sit with a magnifying glass pressed against a copy of a page of the Boston Globe from 23 August 1902 in which, on the occasion of a photo exhibition, there is an interview with the young photographer Jeanne Bertrand. I am in doubt, and so nothing happens. I keep on staring at these blurred century-old letters with my simultaneously short-sighted and long-sighted eyes. Because what does Jeanne Bertrand signify in this context? She signifies (indirectly) a great deal, because she was Vivian’s friend and mentor. And I am captivated by the Saturday in 1902 where the writer met her on the occasion of a photo exhibition… so… I can’t stop… jet-black hair… it is too enticing (a pathetic feeling, because it is not a thought, raising its ugly head: that people who lived a century ago were not as human as humans today – it can surprise me when during film recordings or in writing they put forward or express something human that I am able to recognize; it must correspond to humans who can’t identify with people who have a skin colour different from their own and can outright reach that point in their mind where these people don’t feel suffering or happiness in the same way as they themselves do). I was surprised when, in a recording from the turn of the century of a ship filled with immigrants steering towards New York I saw a man, who, alongside all the others who were pressed against the railing waving small American flags, lifts his baby in the air and grabs its hand and waves it at the Statue of Liberty – that scene could have been from today.
Now I’m on a roll: photographs of people, in particular those within the tradition of realism, used to dishearten me. Now I have looked at so many photographs in the last few years that it no longer has an effect on me. That disheartenment was the whole reason I threw myself upon photographs and into this book. I thought: it cannot simply be because of that familiar sense of ‘that-has-been’, the experience of finitude as it’s called, that photographs make us aware that we are going to die. Couldn’t it (also) be down to something else? Let me interject that I never personally take photographs, I have no desire for it. When I remember something or imagine something, I see it in motion.
What did I conclude? That in all probability it is down to the belief, and this only applies to certain movements within the tradition of realism, that a person’s nature or character or simply their mood or state of mind can be revealed at a particular moment. But I am outside of that person, just as if I had met them in reality, and know nothing about what is taking place on the inside. I can’t do that until they speak: language reveals everything, le style c’est l’homme, it is said; the statement may be hollow, but people’s nature becomes clear through the way they speak and write. Because what else is there other than the questions Who are you? What kind of mood are you in? that this kind of photography invites you to ask…?
(God knows what has now been revealed about me, that I am more short-sighted than far-sighted, spiritually speaking? For once I sit at my desk. I normally sit in my bed to work, I have a large bed, there is room for lots of books, and for my dog, which is an English Bulldog, according to Maier the most masculine of dogs, it knows very well it is not allowed on the bed. It comes sneaking into the bedroom, but its wheezing breath gives it away and it doesn’t realize it. It has been hearing that for its entire life and doesn’t notice it. It thinks that sneaking is sufficient, that it is completely silent, and a cunning expression blossoms on its toad-face as it places its front paws on the bed and pushes off, panting.)
Anyway, my gaze falls upon André Gide’s book, which contains a selection of Montaigne’s essays. Here thank God is a sentence that directly contradicts what I said earlier about not being able to recognize people from other times as being human:
‘Every human carries within them the human condition.’
Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs, the majority of them of people, a great number of close-ups of human faces where there is little background around the face, little context. I don’t know exactly where I want to go with this or where I am inadvertently going with it. What are the bases for her choices? Why did she take a picture of that person’s face in particular and not that one? Did she go after something that could faintly be called ‘interesting faces’? I know that late in life, when she no longer took photographs, she said to one of her neighbours: ‘You have an interesting face.’ So it seems that was a term she operated with �
�� interesting faces.
But while every face might express a human condition, a photograph cannot grasp the entire human condition, but writing can, and that was Montaigne’s project: by writing about himself to get to say ‘everything’ about humanity. But the more people you photograph, the more conditions you might be able to capture. In the end you have a catalogue of conditions. But what really is a condition? It is easier when you have material to work with, it can appear as gas, liquid or solid material. I am inclined to believe that conditions with humans have to do with moods, for example restlessness, joy, expectation, suffering. In any case my inner life (and also Montaigne’s, a good chunk of one essay deals with this) is marked by large and lightning-quick changeability. One second I am insanely happy, the next sunk into the idea of disaster. I’m just saying: obviously a photograph can’t capture that, for that to happen a period of time is required, for that, writing (or film) is required. Only something which narrates can get someone to understand the changeability that is life. And that is what, quite simply, once saddened me about photographs: their rigidity.
Vivian Maier was a street photographer, not a portrait photographer or art photographer. She went for faces but also for situations, human interaction, conduct. A man holding his sleeping dog in his arms, the corners of its mouth drooping, his mouth is also turned downwards. Or: many men and boys in the 1950s stand with their hands at their side in a way that you no longer see – they turn their wrists so that the backs of their hands are facing inward at the hips, and their hands point in the air, a little foolishly. Maybe she went after Time, after the ’50s, the ’60s, the ’70s, the ’80s. Or she was simply a hoarder: she collected everything she saw.
She could move right up close to women, men and children without them realizing it, and capture them while they were lost in their own thoughts, maybe halfway between two chores, thoughtful and adrift (alone with themselves in a sea of thoughts). She must have sneaked up on them, and reportedly she did not have a discreet appearance – she was both tall and dressed unusually. Other times she asked permission and people struck a pose for her. Trust and friendliness shine in the eyes, in the faces of many of those she photographed (that is those who knew about it, these posed ones) – and anticipation. The photograph was not for them, they didn’t even get to see it, their portrait disappeared with a stranger, Maier, off to some unknown place. All the same, they posed. For that moment of intense attention. For the joy of being seen, preserved, surprised, for a moment of joy, of human contact.
Other times people got angry or annoyed. She photographed them all the same.
Sometimes, when I think of myself as a dog whose jaws are locked around its prey – Viv, trapped in my jaws, close to drowning in froth – I remind myself how close she got to other people, how she sneaked up on them.
But now we’re on to Jeanne Bertrand – into the bargain I am fortunate enough that a journalist from a long-since-yellowed newspaper page directly quotes her in a couple of places. If nothing else, this article creates an impression of an immigrant’s life. If nothing else, then Vivian and her mother lived with her for several years, and she was a photographer. They started to photograph together, and for Vivian it became a lifelong pursuit. Jeanne must have had great significance for her. And why didn’t Vivian do what Jeanne did, and try to make a living as a photographer, or at least make the smallest attempt to do so?
23 August 1902
The Boston Globe
From Factory to High Place As Artist
This is the story of Jeanne J. Bertrand, the factory girl who has become one of the most famous photographers in Connecticut, and who gives promise – for she is only twenty-one years of age – of becoming one of the great artistic photographers of the country.
In the career of this fatherless girl, a foreigner in a strange country, with no friends to give her a start, and with little academic education, there is a certain inspiration for all girls.
Jeanne J. Bertrand has been one of the most enthusiastic delegates to the sixth annual convention of the Photographers’ association of New England, which concluded its session last evening in Copley hall. She, with her dark, expressive eyes, her frank, intelligent and girlish face, which is crowned with a wealth of jet black hair, and her little figure, has been welcomed more heartily probably by the other delegates than any other person who was present at the convention.
For she is known by the members of the New England association and the members of the national association as are few others – known for her knowledge and ability, for the girlish frankness and for her enthusiasm for the art to which she says she is wedded.
It was not a case of precocious genius for photography. She had not played with cameras when other girls were playing with dolls. It is just a case of an ambitious girl, who knew absolutely nothing about a camera until some four years ago: a girl who shrank with horror from life in a factory and whose genius was the genius for hard work wherein she could see some future; whose ambition was to play a larger part in the world than she could play in a needle factory, and who made up her mind, if study and perseverance intelligently applied counted for anything in the world’s work she would succeed. And she has succeeded in a very large degree.
‘This is the works of a little girl named Bertrand down in Torrington, Conn.’ said one of the older members of the association to the writer, pointing to about a half dozen excellent character portraits, the evening the exhibit was being hung in Copley Hall. There was work by famous men and women from all over the country, but these examples took high rank among the best.
‘How old a girl?’ was the natural question.
‘About twenty or twenty-one, I should say. She has only been at it a few years, but she has made remarkable progress. She isn’t like most girls, though; she is not afraid to soil her fingers with chemicals in the dark room.’
So it was with some brief knowledge of Jeanne J. Bertrand that the writer sought her out and found her just the frank, intelligent, ambitious young woman he had fancied. She told her little story very naturally and with a touch of pride.
‘I have been interested in photography about four years,’ she said, ‘and I become more and more interested in it every day.’
‘But you must have had a good instructor?’
Worked in Needle Factory
‘Well, Mr Albee, with whom I am associated in Torrington taught me considerable and I have been studying nights and mornings for four years. In that way I have picked up a great deal. Then I have attended the photographic conventions for several years and that has broadened my knowledge considerably.’
‘How did you happen to take up photography?’
‘You see my people were very poor and I had been working in a needle factory where they made sewing machine needles. Oh, it was horrible – nothing but the four brick walls, and then the bossing!’
She clenched her teeth and hands for a moment as she thought of this part of her young life.
‘But,’ she continued, ‘I had to do something and that was about the only thing there was to do in Torrington. Finally one day about four years ago I came home and told my mother that I would leave the factory on the first of April. I told her that I meant it and I did.’
‘Well, girl like, I went to have my photograph taken and as I was coming out of the place the thought came to me that I would like to work in such a place. So I turned around and asked the man if he wanted any help. He said “No,” and if he did he would hire experienced help. He didn’t want any other kind around. I then said to him: “Isn’t there anything I could do around her. I don’t care what it is?” He said “No.” Then I said to him: “Some day you may have an awful lot of work to do, and if you do send for me, and I will do anything I can.” He kind of smiled and said that he would.
‘In a few days, to my surprise, he sent for me. He had a big job of machinery to do – that is, photographing machinery, and I helped putting up the prints for a few days. I enjoyed every moment of
it. It was all so new to me and so different from the factory, and I must have made myself useful, for at the end of the third day Mr Albee said he could not guarantee me steady work, but he liked the way I took hold, and he would do the best he could by me. Oh, I was so glad that night, and I came back the next day, and I’ve been there ever since.’
(…)
‘You were not a native American, Miss Bertrand?’
‘No. I was born in the south of France.’
Then she told of her father’s reverses in his native land. He was a road inspector in the employ of the government. He brought his wife and family of four children to America ‘to pick up dollars on the streets,’ as Jeanne laughingly put it. He was an innocent artisan, who had lived easily among his own kinsmen in his native land, a southern, sunshiny Frenchman who really knew nothing of America. He died two years ago, and his child knows that he died hating everything American.
Tragedy of the Immigrant
He and his little family went through the tragedy which so many millions of immigrants have experienced while undergoing the hardening process in the terrible crucible of American civilization – the annihilation of old ideals and the substitution of a new point of view in nearly all things; the utter indifference of people to cherished customs; then the slow, almost deadening realization that dependence on self is the first rung of the American ladder and that after that life is a battle in which only the strong and indifferent win. All the old home sentiments vanish or have to be materially modified in the new environment.
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