Seeing Vivian Maier: Two Books

For the next few weeks, she'll be the most talked about photographer in America.  powerHouse, one of the world's leading publishers of photography books, has just released a volume devoted to her photos.  Within a few days, her images will be on display in not one, but two high-profile exhibitions in major New York galleries.  A show at the Hearst Gallery, her first New York exhibition, has just closed.  The lavishly illustrated catalog from the Hearst only adds to the impression that her time has come.  She's Vivian Maier.  Sadly, and famously, she's dead.

 

[Click directly on any image to see a much larger version.]

 

There's been a Vivian Maier buzz within the photographic community and among the general public for the past couple of years.  (You can read a report about her in the New York Times, here, and watch a CBS News video, here.  A fine, short documentary from WTTW, Chicago's PBS station, may be the best introduction to the phenomenon.  You can watch it, here.)

The story of what Geoff Dyer calls "an extreme instance of posthumous discovery” has been told many times, and it never fails to amaze.  Until 2007, when the contents of the storage locker in which she kept her photos and other possessions were auctioned off for non-payment of rent, very few people had ever heard of Maier.  Almost no one seems to have known that she was a serious photographer.  In fact, she photographed obsessively -- producing over 150,000 images, from the '50s into the '90s.  Many of them are powerful indeed.

Now, with the exhibitions and especially with the publication of Vivian Maier:  Street Photographer, the powerHouse book, and Vivian Maier, Photographer, the catalog that accompanied the show at the Hearst Gallery, the world at large has its first real occasion to see Vivian Maier.  And to answer the question that's on everyone's mind:  How good was she?

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.  Compilation copyright 2011 powerHouse Books and John Maloof.  Photos copyright 2011 Vivian Maier.

 

Before I offer my own answer to that question, let me quickly sketch in the backstory.

In 2007, a young Chicago real estate agent named John Maloof bought Maier's possessions at an auction and discovered her photos.  It didn't take him long to realize that he had stumbled across something special.  Recognizing the strength of the photos, he was determined to find out as much as he could about the images and the woman who made them.

Before Maloof could locate her, however, Maier died -- elderly and alone, apparently forgotten by everyone, except some of the families for whom she had worked as a nanny.

So it was that, in early 2009, Maloof found himself the custodian of a mystery -- the mammoth archive (over 100,000 negatives and prints) of an unknown, yet highly accomplished photographer.  A little bit later, approximately 10,000 of Maier's prints and negatives found their way into the hands of Jeff Goldstein, another Chicagoan.

Since that time, both men have acted as archivists and detectives.  You can read Maloof's account, here, and Goldstein's, here.

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.

 

Maloof and Goldstein have also made it their mission to preserve Maier's photos and to exhibit them to the public.  Vivian Maier:  Street Photographer and the show at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, which opens on 15 December 2011, are the products of Maloof's efforts.  The exhibition at the Hearst Gallery , which recently closed, Vivian Maier, Photographer, and a third show at the Steven Kasher Gallery (which, like the Greenberg exhibition, opens on December 15th) all feature photos from Goldstein's collection.

If you can't make it to the shows, don't despair.  Both books reproduce Maier's photos beautifully (better than she ever saw them -- a point to which I'll return).  As books, they offer the images as objects of contemplation.  To put it another way, books are a great place to study photos.  Look at them as long and as closely as you'd like -- nobody's going to elbow you out of the way or tell you to stand back three feet.  Books have their limitations, of course.  When the photographer is also the printer, you're better off looking at the print.

But Maier naturally had no say in how her photos are printed here.  The editors made the decisions, and they've chosen to print in the black and white style to which we've grown accustomed -- hard and punchy, with deep blacks and plenty of contrast.  Would Maier have printed them like this?  We'll never know.  She seems to have been content with cheap drugstore prints.

Correction, 15 December 2011:  I've just learned that Maier made over 6,000 of her own prints, apparently in a darkroom she outfitted in her nanny quarters.  According to Ron Slattery, who owns some of these prints, she was a careful and capable printer.  He says that "she had the gift."  Many thanks to Ron for the information.

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.

 

We'll also never know which photos Maier would have chosen to show.  If she edited her work, she didn't leave many traces behind.  (As the correction above notes, she did work in the darkroom.  Choosing which negatives to print is, in itself, a process of editing.)  The books and exhibitions reflect other people's choices.  We'll never even know whether she would have wanted us to see any of her photos at all.  During her lifetime, she chose to keep her work to herself.  (Do we have a right to look?  I think so.  She belongs to history, now.)

The printing and editing may not be Maier's, but the photos surely are.  She decided where to point her camera and when to press the shutter.  When we look at these photographs, we're seeing her eye, mind, and heart at work.

So back to the question at hand:  How good was she?

There are two ways to answer that question.  The first will sound like an evasion, but it's not.  It's simply too soon to tell.

The second is to offer some sort of preliminary assessment.  This is precisely what Geoff Dyer does in his forward to Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.  Given the hype that's preceded the book's publication and the New York shows, his claims are surprisingly modest.  Maier, he says, "is an important addition to the canon of street photography; some of her images are outstanding."

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.

 

I suspect that Dyer is underselling Maier, but it's too soon to get into that kind of argument.  We just haven't seen enough of her work.  Vivian Maier, Street Photographer contains something on the order of 100 photos, and there are just over 50 in Vivian Maier, Photographer.  That represents a tiny portion of her total output.  In addition, almost all of the photos in Vivian Maier, Street Photographer are from the '50s or early '60s, even though she photographed as late as the '90s.  Vivian Maier, Photographer shows fewer photos, but covers a broader time frame -- from the '50s into the '70s.

Coming to terms with any photographer means seeing as much of his or her work as possible, not just a fraction of it.  It means looking at the misses as well as the hits.  Coming to terms also means determining whether the look and feel of a photographer's images changed over time.  If so, we want to know how, how much, and why.

It's no fault of either Maloof or Goldstein that they've shown us a few photos from a restricted time frame.  Maloof is swimming in a sea of over 100,000 prints and negatives.  Goldstein's archive might seem more manageable, but only until you stop to think about what a number like 10,000 actually means.

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.

 

So what can we say about Vivian Maier?  Well, it occurs to me that, while I've been blathering on, you've been looking at her photos and making up your own mind.  I'm going to bet that you've thinking two things:  They're good, and they look familiar.

But I won't put words into your mouth.  I'll tell you what the photos say to me.

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.

 

Her many self-portraits -- a few of which can be seen here on the covers of both books, opposite the title page of Vivian Maier, Street Photographer (the powerHouse book), and, interestingly I think, in the very last photo in this post -- tell us that she was a self-conscious artist.  The strongest of them are searching, fearless, and visually compelling.

Like the best street photographers of her generation, she documented the theater of urban life and was a master at capturing the fleeting moment, gesture, and glance.  She also had formidable technique.  No one consistently captures fleeting moments with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera without it.

 

Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.

 

Maier may have been socially isolated, but she was by no means artistically isolated.  Her work looks familiar because it resonates so profoundly with the work of other photographers of her era.  I see traces of humanistic street photography of Helen Levitt and Robert Doisneau.  Occasionally I find myself reminded of Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, and Lee Friedlander (for the self-portraits).  Geoff Dyer adds Lisette Model, Andre Kertez, and Walker Evans to the list.  (Feel free to contribute your own suggestions.)

I don't mean to say that she was imitating any of these photographers.  Rather she saw the work and learned from it (as all of them learned from each other).  In fact, we know that she owned a small collection of photo books.

It might be that one of the strongest influences on her photography was a book and exhibition, not a particular photographer.  "The Family of Man" opened at New York's Museum of Modern Art in 1955 and instantly became the most popular show that it had ever held.  It subsequently toured the United States and many foreign countries, including the Soviet Union.  Hundreds of thousands of people saw the exhibition.

The catalog, also called The Family of Man, has sold millions of copies, more than any other photo book, by far.  (It's still in print.)  Leading photographers of the era --  Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Capa, Margaret Bourke-White, Roy DeCarava, Bill Brandt -- were among the many dozens of photographers whose images were included.  The dominant style drew on street photography and fly-on-the-wall photojournalism.

It's impossible to think that Maier, who read widely, bought photo books, and followed current events, was somehow unaware of the exhibition and the book.

Although the photographers represented in "Family of Man" possessed a variety of attitudes and ideologies, Edward Steichen's curation tended to homogenize them, shaping the exhibition into a coherent, humanistic, and sometimes sentimental whole.

Many of Maier's photos would have fit comfortably into "Family of Man."  It's not hard to imagine that, if Steichen had seen them, he would have happily included a few.

This same thought must have occurred to the editors of Vivian Maier, Street Photographer.  One of the last photos in the book (which you can see directly above) powerfully echoes the final photograph in "Family of Man," both the exhibition and the book.  It's W. Eugene Smith's "A Walk to Paradise Garden", and you can see it, here.

 

From Vivian Maier, Photographer (Hearst Gallery catalog).  Photos copyright Vivian Maier Prints, Inc.  [Remember, you can click on any of these images to see much larger versions.]

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer, the catalog from the now-closed show at the Hearst Gallery (which John Bennette curated with senstivity and insight), is in many way quite different from the powerHouse book.  It's much smaller and contains fewer photos, yet, as I've mentioned, it covers a broader time period.  Many of the photos are from the late '60s and early '70s, giving us a chance to speculate on the ways in which Maier's photography changed over time.

It also opens with a selection of vintage prints.  (You can see some of them directly above.)  When curators and collectors hear the words "vintage prints," they think of fine prints that were made during the photographer's lifetime, either by the photographer or under his or her supervision.

In Maier's case, "vintage" simply means that they were made while she was alive.  They're far from fine; she probably got them from the drugstore down the street.  They remind us that she didn't see her photographs as we do, both literally and metaphorically.  She never saw printed large or particularly well.  She may have thought of them as art, but she never saw them presented that way.

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer.

 

It's impossible for us not to see them as art, especially when they're printed in a gallery catalog and surrounded by wide white borders.  But it's not just a matter of presentation.  As Dyer said, some of the photos are "outstanding."

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer.

 

Some share the humanism and occasional sentimentality of the photos in the powerHouse book.  Others clearly do not.

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer.

 

Yes, that's Tricky Dick Nixon on the left.

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer.

 

It's tempting to say that the photos in Vivian Maier, Photographer show us the ways in which Maier's photography the '60s and '70s was changing, moving away from the humanism that dominated her vision in the '50s photography and developing into something tougher, more individualistic, and penetrating.  It's tempting, but I'm not going to say it.  I simply don't haven't seen enough of her photos than do anything more than speculate along those lines.

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer.

 

But, like I say, it's tempting.  For instance, Maier made the photo on the left sometime in the late '60s, according to the catalog.  (The car that you can partially see in the background confirms that it can't have been earlier.)  It looks for all the world like something Garry Winogrand would have shot, if he'd been interested in photographing older women, rather than the young and conventionally beautiful.

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer.

 

Vivian Maier, Photographer closes with this photo.  I will, too.  It seems to me that it's one of her strongest of her many self-portraits.  Even if I'm wrong about this being a self-portrait of sorts, it serves as a reminder that, for the time being, Vivian Maier is as much of an absence as a presence.

* * *

You can read some of my earlier thoughts about Vivian Maier, here.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should mention that I'm one of 1,495 people who backed "Finding Vivian Maier," John Maloof's documentary film about her, on the social fund-raising website Kickstarter.

Comments

[Todd Dominey]

Excellent critique John. I received my (Kickstarter funded) copy of the book earlier this week and greatly enjoyed it.

[John A Bennnette]

Thank you ,this is a wonderfully balanced piece and a great way to start Vivian Maier In New York.She was born in The Bronx so that makes New York her hometown.There will be many years of discovery ahead ,your last line is a great start.

Once again thank you for mentioning me and the Hearst exhibition that recently ended.I hope you will be able to visit the exhibitions that open tomorrow at Howard Greenberg and Steve Kasher

[Andrew Shaylor]

John.

That really summed it up for me.

Thanks.

[Stan B.]

I really can't say enough about her work, it inspires and excels on so many levels- and her particular life's journey only adds to a much well deserved "legend."

I have not seen Vivian Maier, Photographer- but I'm sadly disappointed with Vivian Maier, Street photographer, which I had to return because I simply could not bear to look at it. The sepia toned prints (nostalgic overkill) are cheaply reproduced and just seem to drain all the life and spontaneity right out of them. Can't wait until a quality book publisher does her work justice in a decade or two- as has occurred with other photographers of note. A long wait to be sure, but we've all waited this long, just hope I'm around to see it...

[John]

Stan, I respect your opinion, but I'm going to disagree with you about the print quality in "Vivian Maier: Street Photographer." The photos were clearly reproduced to a price point, but, to my eye, they're not awful. I'd give them a "B."

As for the sepia toning... A matter of taste, I guess. It didn't bother me -- until you mentioned it!