Mute, inglorious Vivian Maier
"Who would have known she was actually a great artist and she'd come to dumpster diving?"
Before we start
Check out my new salon series How to Read a Novel. We’ll read six short classic novels in six months and learn about the techniques novelists use to structure their books. We start with Persuasion.
I wrote about walking around London for The Critic.
It is better, for some biographical subjects, to watch a documentary rather than read a book, assuming you will not be doing both. Vivian Maier is probably such a subject. Maier worked as a live-in nanny and housekeeper. After she died, a large box of her photographic negatives was found. She turned out to have been a first-rate photographer of huge ability. This was a surprise to everyone who knew her. She always had a camera, but she had not been suspected of being a great artist.
One of the people who regularly saw Maier in the park, when she was an old lady, said, “There’s a lot of eccentric people round here and I just thought she was one of them.” Far from dying acclaimed, she sometimes ate corned beef from discarded cans. "Who would have known,” a former neighbour said, “she was actually a great artist and she’d come to dumpster diving?"She died like Mrs Palfrey. “A lot of people in the neighbourhood said, ‘What happened to the old lady?’ And no-one ever knew.”
Piecing together this sort of life is difficult. Maier was a very private person and much of the value of this documentary is not just in the many self-portraits she took but in the recordings of her voice. The other advantage this film has over a written biography is the recordings of the families Maier worked with. You can see and hear most of what they mean; their words convey only part of their message. This is especially true for the people who were treated badly by Maier as children.
The discovery of Maier’s negatives happened to the photographer John Maloof, who was looking simply for old images of Chicago to use in a local history book he was writing. Unlike Alexander Masters, who intruded constantly on his subject Laura, the wonderful diarist, with his mundane bourgeois self-interest and startling incompetence — at best, a self-indulgent act of gatekeeping — Maloof maintains a careful position as investigator and advocate. (Interestingly, Maier’s work as a nanny is similar to the diarist Laura’s as a housekeeper.) Throughout the documentary Maloof shows Maier’s work, the way people thought of her. He hovers like a guide or curator, he never disrupts the scene.
The inevitable question is, “why pry?” Why not publish and exhibit the photographs, as Maloof has done, and leave it at that? Maier didn’t want her life to be known to other people. Some would call this intrusive, or worse. Here is the clinching argument, a theory given by a photographer about why Maier never got her work printed.
Some people’s character prevents them from pushing that little bit you need — to push to get the work seen.
And so through a twist of fate, a personality that was well attuned to taking photographs but not to printing or selling them, Maier became not one of the great names of twentieth century photography, but a mute inglorious Milton, who would have remained in obscurity if it weren’t for a chance purchase at a local auction one day. Look at her work, even briefly, and you will see immediately what a deep sense of tragedy hangs over her life. Just think: none of this was known, even by the few people who knew her somewhat well. Without the biographical impulse, it might not be known now. How many other people are there like this?
This tragic pattern is well presented in Maloof’s documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, which kaleidoscopes the major and minor contradictions and consistencies of the way she behaved with different groups of people, the things they believed about her that turned out to be wrong, and the obvious difficulty she had in sustaining anything like a friendship. She was a lonely troubled woman, in some ways living the life she wanted, but in many ways not.
This is an excellent piece of biographical documentary about a failure who deserved to be a success. Like I said, let there be more biographies of failures. She reminds me of Jackson C. Frank.
Before you go
Check out my new salon series How to Read a Novel. We’ll read six short classic novels in six months and learn about the techniques novelists use to structure their books. We start with Persuasion.
I wrote about walking around London for The Critic.
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