Vivian Maier

by Colin Westerbeck

  Self-portrait, location and date unknown.

  Chicago, 1962.

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Foreword by Joel Meyerowitz

  Introduction by Colin Westerbeck

  Plates

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  About the Photographer

  About the Contributors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  One of photography’s truths is that the best street photographers learn to be invisible or, at the very least, to convince themselves that they are. Over the years, I’ve walked the streets with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Garry Winogrand, Tony Ray-Jones, Diane Arbus, Lee Friedlander, Tod Papageorge, and some of today’s younger shooters—Gus Powell, Melanie Einzig, Ben Ingham, and Matt Stuart—and we have all developed our own sleight-of-hand street act. We dodge, feint, twirl, two-step, and eye-shift our way through crowds and rallies, along avenues and backstreets, in parks and on beaches, anywhere that ordinary life draws our attention and desire. It is our invisibility that helps us get away with stealing fire from the gods.

  In 2009, into the well-established history of street photography flashed the unexpected comet of Vivian Maier. In October of that year I received an email from John Maloof, a young artist I didn’t know. He introduced himself and told me the story of how he had purchased a cache of negatives, slides, and some prints at a storage-warehouse auction. Knowing my work, as well as Bystander: The History of Street Photography, a book I coauthored with Colin Westerbeck, he had decided to write to ask whether I would be kind enough to give him my opinion on Maier’s photographs.

  Attached to the email were about two hundred color slides made between the late 1950s and mid- 1970s, all of which John had scanned. I can’t say that my immediate first impression was that they were fantastic, but as I clicked through the unedited raw work I kept getting glimpses of Maier’s insights and timing; great, positive attitude; way of framing; courage of her convictions about how close she was willing to go; genuine curiosity; and undeniable, humanistic warmth, irony, and humor, all of which produced an overall sense of a coherent life view. After looking at all the images, I had that delightful sense that comes from seeing inspiring and intelligent work. I went back through the slides, cut them down to forty or fifty, and looked at them again.

  Now I could really see the heart in the work. Who was this woman? Was she simply a naïf who sprang whole into midcentury American photography, or had she done her fair share of looking at other work? Before writing back to John, I wrote to Colin: “You have to see this work—an unknown woman just landed in the middle of the history of street photography.” There were tender portraits and exquisite moments of frozen action; there were streetscapes and children at play; there were small details and gestures beautifully seen and framed, as well as photographs of the old, the down-and-out, and the lost souls of Chicago and New York. Above all, there was a fierce intelligence weaving its way throughout the color work. All this, in color! How courageous, and how invisible! I was sure she didn’t print color, because . . . who did back then? Which meant that the photographs had stayed hidden in boxes and most likely hadn’t played a big role in her artistic growth, yet they were—and are now—works of value to us who are alive to see her development.

  Look closely at the many self-portraits Vivian Maier made, and you will see her disguises, her cloak of invisibility. She’s as plain as an old-fashioned schoolmarm. She’s the wallflower, the spinster aunt, the ungainly tourist in the big city . . . except . . . she isn’t! She was a professional nanny, which is a great disguise in itself—because how suspicious or dangerous could a woman shepherding a couple of kids possibly be? Her line of work gave her license to be out on the streets, making any image she was interested in. You can see in her photographs that she was a quick study of human behavior, of the unfolding moment, the flash of a gesture, or the mood of a facial expression—brief events that turned the quotidian life of the street into a revelation for her.

  However, my sense is that Maier preferred to shoot, and made stronger work, in black-and-white for several reasons. Black-and-white was a faster film to work with, as opposed to early Kodachrome, which was extremely slow and therefore riskier. With black-and-white, she could have prints to hold in her hand and reflect upon, which would put her more in harmony with her instincts. Her heart for the game of sight, the strength and purity of her instinct, and her deep love of photography show up more consistently in black-and-white. It was in this medium that she learned to stand her ground, to move in close to cops and drunks, punks and wise guys, and the old and infirm, yet stay connected and maintain her sense of humor in difficult situations.

  But there are memorable gems in Maier’s color work, and some terrific observations and characters are to be found in this book. You can see again and again the way color could entice her when a “color incident” emerged out of the flux of daily life. Take, for example, the simple image shown on the cover of this book of a hand holding a pinkie, folded on a red dress in a strangely affecting gesture behind a woman’s back—an image as powerful as a nation’s flag.

  Maier was an early poet of color photography.

  —Joel Meyerowitz

  Self-portrait, location unknown, 1956.

  Introduction

  We dance around in a ring and suppose,

  But the Secret sits in the middle and knows.

  —Robert Frost, “The Secret Sits,” 1936

  Robert Frost’s poem “The Secret Sits” should have been chiseled on Vivian Maier’s tombstone. “I’m the mystery woman,” Maier once told some children she tended during her long career as a nanny. She was indeed the mystery woman, and remained so until a couple of years after she died. When an artist’s fame arrives only postmortem, it puts a special burden on the work itself to tell us who he or she was—especially in this case, when all we have, besides around 140,000 negatives and positives, are the scattered reminiscences of a few people who were not, themselves, in the art world. The one other photographer who immediately comes to mind as having had such posthumous fame, Eugène Atget, is more intimidating than encouraging. Atget was a failed actor who supported himself by making “documents for artists,” as the sign outside his Paris atelier read. Though he died in relative obscurity, his photographic documentation of the city in the early twentieth century is now considered one of the great masterworks in the medium’s history. But before determining whether Maier’s work merits a place in that pantheon, let’s first examine a different art-world context into which her career might fit by analogy.

  Two years after World War II ended, three photographers—Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, and David Seymour, who worked under the byline “Chim”—established an invitation-only cooperative for photojournalists, which they called Magnum. The emphasis was not on the star power of the photographers but rather on maintaining a certain quality of work, no matter which member came up in the rotation. Cartier-Bresson was successful at keeping the public’s eye on his photographs rather than his personal life. But Capa, whose death-defying coverage of war and movie-star good looks made him a romantic figure anyway, died in 1954 while photographing in Indochina, after which his life became the sort of legend that often reduced his photographs to mere illustration of his myth.

  In 1967, twenty years after the founding of Magnum, another triumvirate of photographers emerged in New Documents, an exhibition organized by John Szarkowski, the photography curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA). The three photographers were Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, and Diane Arbus, and their work was a documentation of everyday life rather than the historic epic to which Magnum was dedicated. Aga
in, though, the premature death of one of the three turned her photography into merely the evidence and illustration of her character: in this case, Arbus’s suicide in July 1971 reduced her work to a puzzle in which the photographs are clues to an enigmatic personality. Neither Winogrand nor Friedlander has merited a biography, but in 2016 the third biography of Arbus since her death was published—Diane Arbus: Portrait of a Photographer, a definitive work by Arthur Lubow in which 600 pages of text are followed by 150 pages of notes.

  Garry Winogrand, World’s Fair, New York, 1964.

  © The Estate of Garry Winogrand, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

  Fast-forward almost forty years, to 2009, when the death of another photographer, who also happened to be a woman, inspired a new cult of personality. Vivian Maier was eighty-three when she died of natural causes. This photographer is a figure of fascination not because she was famous in her lifetime, like Capa or Arbus, but because she was virtually unknown to the public. For that very reason, the effort to try to understand her life by looking at her photographs seems deeply compelling. Maier was not a primitive—someone with a natural talent for photography who created a great body of work in isolation from and ignorance of the art history of her medium—although the extent of her exposure to photography’s history remains, like so much else about her, uncertain.

  Maier was born in New York in 1926, the second child of an American father, Carl Maier, and a French mother, Marie Jaussaud. Her parents divorced, and in 1932 she and her mother returned to her mother’s hometown of Saint-Julien in France’s Champsaur valley, near the Swiss border. Six years later, Maier and her peripatetic mother returned to New York, when Maier’s deranged older brother, Carl, was released from jail. Carl later died at a New Jersey rest home in 1977, two years after their mother died destitute in New York.

  Lee Friedlander, New York City, 1966.

  © Lee Friedlander, Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco.

  It was in the midst of more such comings and goings that Maier took up photography. After the war, Maier learned that she had inherited her family’s ancestral home in Saint-Julien from her great-aunt, who had died in 1943. Maier returned there in 1950 to sell the place. She was then twenty-four and had been working in a New York doll factory to support herself, but after selling her inheritance she had enough money to do whatever she wanted for a while—and she wanted to take photographs. She stayed in Saint-Julien to extensively document this rural, traditional part of France.

  She returned to New York in mid-1951. This was when her acculturation to photographic history seems to have begun in earnest. In 1952, she went to the exhibition Five French Photographers at MoMA. Three years later, when Edward Steichen, then MoMA’s photography curator, opened his extravaganza exhibition The Family of Man, Maier went to it twice, which suggests she was trying to take it all in, to digest as much of the medium’s history as she could.

  That exhibition was the best-attended photography show MoMA had ever done, and included in it was an image by the photographer who would be the subject of the next-best-attended exhibition in MoMA’s history. Where Steichen’s blockbuster had been a worldwide survey the 1972 exhibition, Diane Arbus, curated by Szarkowski, was a monographic show, a memorial exhibition that opened in the fall of the year after Arbus committed suicide. The Arbus show had more of an impact on photography aficionados than did Steichen’s anthology of photojournalism.

  Although Maier had left New York for Chicago more than a decade earlier, the exhibition caused such a stir that it’s likely she was aware of it. Moreover, even if she couldn’t get away to see the exhibition in New York, she had the perfect chance to do so the following spring, as the first stop on the exhibition’s tour was the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. There, she would also have had the opportunity to buy the catalog. Aside from just a chance to see Arbus’s work, Maier had a compelling personal reason to be interested in the exhibition. Unlike almost all other photographers trying to make pictures of people in public places, Arbus, like Maier, used the twin-lens Rolleiflex camera. Up until about this point in the early 1970s, the Rollei was Maier’s preferred camera, too.

  There is some controversy—or perhaps just some confusion—surrounding the personal library on photography Maier is reputed to have assembled. John Maloof, who acquired Maier’s photographs at auction and later set up an archive of her work, told me that until nearly the end of her life, whatever books she might have read belonged to her employers, although she bought a few books herself. That account seems to be supported by another report that among the books Maier owned were some volumes of the Life Library of Photography series published in the 1970s. But according to the sister of a child Maier was caring for at the time, in 1990 Maier had “piled her bedroom five feet deep with books, leaving only a narrow path to her bed. Then she covered that—and slept on the floor.” Other sources have likewise testified that she accumulated quite a collection of books over the years.

  “My life is in boxes,” Maier announced at one point when she was moving within the Chicago area, apparently referring to boxes and boxes of books, along with other possessions. She took photographs of an overloaded bookcase and, at another address, stacks of books piled up on top of the toilet in her bathroom. The issue won’t be resolved until whatever books she did have are exhumed from storage at the Vivian Maier Archive. In the meantime, I’ll go on record now saying that when an account of her books is finally available, one of them will turn out to be the slim, paperbound Arbus catalog that Szarkowski published in 1972.

  Discrepancies in the accounts of Maier’s library are indicative of larger uncertainty about her life story. Nonetheless, two recent publications shed new light: Ann Marks’s Vivian Maier Developed: The Real Story of the Photographer Nanny and Pamela Bannos’s Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife. I owe special thanks to Marks for giving me access to her text before it was officially published. Bannos’s book is particularly valuable for its first seven chapters, which give a full account of the first fifty or so years of Maier’s life. Chapter eight, “The Missing Picture: Vivian Maier’s Last Thirty Years,” is only ten pages long. Those last thirty years—a time when her photography soared as her professional and personal life declined—mark the period when, working with a 35-millimeter camera, Maier made roughly forty thousand Ektachrome color slides. Those photographs tell their own story, and that is the one I intend to trace here—to see how and where Maier fits into the history of photography.

  Self-portrait, New York City, December 23, 1954.

  Location unknown, October 1976.

  One of the few positive influences on Maier’s early life was a woman named Emilie Haugmard. Haugmard became Maier’s de facto caretaker in 1941, when Maier was fifteen and her mother began a peripatetic life, in effect abandoning her daughter forever. Childcare was Haugmard’s profession, so her kindness may have influenced Maier to become a nanny herself. Beginning in 1951, when she returned to New York, Maier’s vocation was childcare and her even more consuming avocation was photography. In the 35-millimeter color work that she made from the 1970s through the 1990s, photography of children was one of the two dominant genres that she practiced.

  The workaday lesson in life that caring for other people’s children provided matured Maier’s photography. When she moved to Chicago in 1956, it was to care for the children of well-to-do families. She settled into the upscale, suburban communities of the North Shore, where she went from one family to another, pretty much without interruption, until she was in her seventies. How her attitudes toward the world in which she lived developed, changed, and deepened in this period is reflected primarily in her photography. Aside from what and how she photographed, we have until recently had only scattered memories of and anecdotes about her to go by.

  The most whimsical and numerous photographs she made were, understandably, of the children in her care. Because the smallest tykes were squirmy, clumsy, and more likely to injure themselves, she h
ad her strategies for keeping them from harm. One was to be a helicopter nanny, staying so close that her photographs of them seem almost abstract at times. Another was to contain them, to make a game of getting them to hide or play in a basket, a planter, or some other tight space where they could do themselves no harm.

  While playful photographs like these were the most numerous, Maier could also take truly transcendent ones (see here). This 1960 image, for example, shows the gifted photographer’s sensitivity to light as a subject equal to or even more important than the nominal subject upon which the light falls. Coming inside, perhaps from an afternoon out playing in the sunshine, the boy seems dazed by the sheer force of the light falling on him. He touches the screen door as if to steady himself. His momentary distraction is the occasion for Maier’s concentration, her instantaneous focus of both mind and camera. A dialectical relationship like this between photographer and subject makes for the best sort of photograph. It creates the paradox inherent in all art.

  A few other photographs of children are noteworthy not because they are better than the ones she made of her charges, but because they are of African American children from a different walk of life. Maier began photographing African Americans on a trip she made around the United States in 1958, and she continued to do so on and off for the next thirty years or more. Her photographs of African Americans demonstrate that her view of life was broader than the conservative, suburban environment in which she worked.

  Another subject Maier returned to periodically was department-store mannequins, like the photograph of a posed, poised, fashionably dressed female amid undressed children—perhaps an image of a nanny surrounded by her charges—here. This comic photograph may also reflect a darker mood into which she was slipping at the time. Even as her interests as a photographer were expanding and her images were soaring to new artistic heights, her work reflected a decline into obsession in some ways, such as the repeated attraction to certain subjects—naked mannequins with mature female bodies among them.