Chicagoland, June 1977.
Location unknown, c. 1960–1976.
Chicagoland, 1978.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, May 1977.
Chicagoland, July 1983.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, October 1977.
Chicago, July 1977.
Location unknown, c. 1965–1978.
Chicago, 1962.
Chicago, September 1978.
Chicago, September 1975.
Location unknown, May 1958.
Chicago, May 1975.
Chicago, date unknown.
Chicago, 1977.
Location and date unknown.
Self-portrait, Chicago, February 1976.
Chicago, 1979.
Location unknown, c. 1960–1976.
Chicago, 1979.
Chicago, October 1977.
Chicago, 1967.
Self-portrait, location unknown, 1961.
Location and date unknown.
Self-portrait, Chicago, July 1978.
Chicagoland, July 1979.
Chicagoland, January 1976.
Chicagoland, 1976.
Chicagoland, December 1962.
Chicagoland, January 1977.
Location unknown, August 1978.
Chicagoland, October 1975.
Location and date unknown.
Location and date unknown.
Location and date unknown.
Location and date unknown.
Location and date unknown.
Chicagoland, May 1978.
Chicagoland, January 1978.
Location unknown, 1966.
Chicagoland, August 1966.
Chicagoland, 1972.
Chicagoland, August 1984.
Location and date unknown.
Chicago, April 1977.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, August 1980.
Chicagoland, October 1975.
Chicagoland, April 1967.
Chicago, April 1977.
New York City, 1959.
Location unknown, 1976.
Chicago, February 1976.
Chicago, 1978.
Location unknown, 1978.
Chicagoland, 1977.
Chicagoland, 1976.
Chicagoland, July 1975.
Chicago, December 1976.
Location unknown, 1960.
Chicago, April 1977.
Chicago, April 1976.
Chicago, April 1976.
Location unknown, March 1979.
Chicagoland, May 1975.
Chicago, 1962.
Location and date unknown.
Location unknown, 1960.
Chicago, 1956.
Chicagoland, November 1979.
Location unknown, 1960.
Chicago, 1976.
Location unknown, 1976.
Chicago, 1973.
Location and date unknown.
Chicagoland, August 1984.
Location unknown, 1975.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, June 1976.
Location and date unknown.
Chicago, 1960.
Chicago, December 1974.
Chicago, September 1965.
Chicagoland, February 1976.
Self-portrait, Chicago, January 1979.
Location unknown, August 1965.
Chicago, November 1976.
Chicago, 1977.
Chicago, 1977.
Keystone, South Dakota, June 1967.
Chicago, 1957.
Location unknown, 1959.
Location unknown, 1959.
Location unknown, 1959.
Location unknown, 1959.
Location and date unknown.
The Art Institute of Chicago, date unknown.
Chicago, 1979.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, 1975.
Chicago, 1975.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, 1975.
Location unknown, 1956.
Self-portrait, Chicagoland, date unknown.
Self-portrait, location unknown, c. 1952.
Self-portrait, location unknown, 1958.
Acknowledgments
I would like to express my gratitude to the following individuals without whom completion of this book would not have been possible: John Maloof, Colin Westerbeck, Joel Meyerowitz, Gregory Wakabayashi, Steve Rifkin, Nicholas Xavier Esposito, Jerry Mocarsky, Mark Sage, Joseph Hartwell, and Ian Hartsoe.
Thanks to the entire staff at Howard Greenberg Gallery, especially Cortney Norman, Karen Marks, Alicia Colen, and Rachel Petersman.
At HarperCollins Publishers, thanks to executive editor Elizabeth Viscott Sullivan, art director Lynne Yeamans, production designer Susan Kosko, and designer Sebit Min.
Finally, thanks to Anne Morin, Ann Marks, the estate of Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander, the Art Institute of Chicago, Art Resource, Fondation Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Magnum Photos.
—Howard Greenberg
Notes
Robert Frost’s poem “The Secret Sits”: Robert Frost, The Poetry of Robert Frost: The Collected Poems, Complete and Unabridged, ed. Edward Connery Lathem (New York: Henry Holt, 1979), 362, first published as “Ring Around” in Poetry, 1936.
“I’m the mystery woman”: Ann Marks, Vivian Maier Developed: The Real Story of the Photographer Nanny (Amazon Digital Services, 2017), Amazon Kindle location 155. This remark is also quoted in Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows (Chicago: CityFiles Press, 2012), 87. The narrative of Maier’s life in the Marks biography overlaps the one in Cahan and Williams’s in many ways, but Marks clarified the chronology of Maier’s background and life by using genealogical records.
a couple of years after she died: In 2007, two years before Maier died, the storage facility where she had stashed her photography put her stored items up for public auction because she had stopped paying the bill. The most active of several people who bought the consigned lots was John Maloof. But his attempts to track her down were unavailing until he saw her death notice in the Chicago Tribune in 2009. The first monographic study of her photography career appeared in 2011, after which new monographs came out every year for the next three years. An account of the history of her reputation can be found in Cahan and Williams, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, 283.
ancestral home in Saint-Julien: Pamela Bannos, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017), 14, 32, 39. See also Marks, Vivian Maier Developed, 58, 71.
Maier went to it twice: Marks, Vivian Maier Developed, 76, 96.
until nearly the end of her life: John Maloof, e-mail correspondence with the author, September 6, 2017.
Life Library of Photography: Bannos, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, 55.
“piled her bedroom five feet deep”: Cahan and Williams, Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows, 86, 156, 262; Marks, Vivian Maier Developed, 139.
accumulated quite a collection: Ann Marks, e-mail correspondence with the author, September 10, 2017. Marvin Heiferman also affirms that Maier “assembled a library of thousands of books that included monographs on photographers ranging from Cecil Beaton to Thomas Struth.” Marvin Heiferman, “Lost, Then Found: The Life and Photographic Work of Vivian Maier,” in John Maloof, Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found (New York: Harper Design, 2014), 20.
“My life is in boxes”: Cahan and Williams, Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows, 262.
a woman named Emilie Haugmard: For more information on Haugmard, see Marks, Vivian Maier Developed, 51; and Bannos, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, 114–15.
35-millimeter color work: Marks believes that Maier shot her last rolls of film in 1999, ten years before her death. Ann Marks, private communication with the author, September 7, 2017.
may suggest that she was a lesbian: Ann Marks also broaches this subject, obliquely, with her analysis of a photograph Maier made of a little girl whom Marks describes as “a potential metaphor for the photographer herself . . . part little girl, part g
rown man as she fronts a shop selling he-man gloves, wearing an oversized watch.” Marks, Vivian Maier Developed, 155.
Roland Barthes called a punctum: Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), 25–27, 43ff.
an open and inclusive and very fundamental idea: Cahan and Williams, Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows, 40. Cahan clarified the source of Sekula’s remarks in an e-mail to the author, September 6, 2017. He explained that Sekula had written to him on June 10, 2012, with the answer he had given an Associated Press reporter who had asked him the year before about his comment that “Vivian Maier had a kind of social vision.”
“Do I contradict myself?”: Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” first published in 1855.
“Photography is editing”: The full quote reads as follows (emphasis added): “With the camera, it’s all or nothing. You either get what you’re after at once, or what you do has to be worthless. I don’t think the essence of photography has the hand in it so much. The essence is done very quietly with a flash of the mind, and with a machine. I think too that photography is editing, editing after the taking. After knowing what to take, you have to do the editing.” Walker Evans, 1971, PhotoQuotes.com, http://www.photoquotes.com/showquotes.aspx?id=196#ixzz4uBYaFrix.
About the Photographer
VIVIAN MAIER (1926–2009) was born in New York City, and spent forty years working as a nanny in Chicago. During her lifetime she shot more than one hundred thousand images, although her work remained unknown until it was discovered at an auction in Chicago by historian John Maloof. Her photographs have been exhibited in galleries and museums as well as featured in magazines and newspapers worldwide.
About the Contributors
JOHN MALOOF is an artist, historian, and collector. He discovered the first negatives of Vivian Maier’s work in 2007 while compiling a book about the history of the Chicago neighborhood where he resided. He edited the first and second published collections of Maier’s work, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer and Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits. He lives in Skokie, Illinois.
JOEL MEYEROWITZ is a street photographer in the tradition of Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank, although he works exclusively in color. As an early advocate, he became instrumental in changing the attitude toward color photography from one of resistance to nearly universal acceptance. His first book, Cape Light, is considered a classic work of color photography; he has published twenty-five other books including a two-volume retrospective, Taking My Time. A Guggenheim fellow, he is a recipient of both the National Endowment for the Arts and National Endowment for the Humanities awards. His work is in the collections of many prestigious museum collections worldwide. He lives in Italy and New York.
COLIN WESTERBECK is the author of numerous books on photography, including Chuck Close: Photographer; A Democracy of Imagery; and with Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander: A History of Street Photography. The former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and former director of the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside, he has written a weekly column on photography for the Los Angeles Times and is a frequent contributor to Art in America. He lives in Los Angeles.
HOWARD GREENBERG is one of the world’s foremost photography gallerists. He is a leading authority on nineteenth- and twentieth-century photography, and has been an acknowledged leader of establishing its value on the fine art market. His gallery, the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York City, is the primary representative of the work of Vivian Maier from the Maloof Collection.
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Copyright
NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHER: Vivian Maier did not title or date her images. For some of the images published in this book, specific dates are based upon notations that were written on the original envelopes and sleeves in which Maier stored her negatives. Approximate dates have been assigned to others. Identifying the locations where the photographs were made has been based upon visual evidence in the images themselves or inferred from records of Maier’s work and travel history.
VIVIAN MAIER: THE COLOR WORK. © 2018 John Maloof and Howard Greenberg. All photographs © 2018 The Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery unless otherwise indicated. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
Cover design by Sebit Min
Cover photographs © 2018 The Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery
First published in 2018 by
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2017947958
Digital Edition NOVEMBER 2018 ISBN: 978-0-06-279558-8
Version 09262018
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-279557-1
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