Vivian Maier : “I’m a Sort of Spy.”

 

 
In her lifetime, while working as a nanny in New York and Chicago, and living an intensely private existence, Vivian Maier simultaneously created around 150,000 photographs, her other life unbeknown even to those who employed her. Unsurprisingly, given the creative canonisation that followed the discovery of her archive in 2007, the myth of Vivian Maier has tended to receive as much, if not more, attention than her actual images. This deftly curated exhibition, comprising just 140 photographs, goes some way to redressing that imbalance.
 
Anthology highlights the range of Maier’s work – street scenes, snatched portraits and mischievous self-portraits as well as formal architectural studies, urban still lifes and angular closeups of arms, torsos, skin and fabric – but also her eye for moments of quiet intimacy or reverie. Sometimes, she seems so close to her subjects that you long to know what happened just after they heard the click of her shutter. Often, one or two individuals are singled out for her attention, freeze-framed amid the street bustle and bathed in light and shadow: a young woman in profile, her face veiled, appears both glamorous and mysterious as if she had stepped out of a noir film; two women, both draped in fox-fur stoles, caught from behind while deep in conversation; a dapper, bequiffed young man stares intensely at a pigeon that has landed, wings outspread, on his hand to peck at a bag of birdseed.

 
At other times, she shoots from high above the streets, homing in on the widescreen play of silhouetted bodies against the angles and grids of modernist mid-century Manhattan. She seems to have embraced each new challenge, or perhaps anticipated the shifting nature of the medium as it moved from straight documentary to something more expressively exuberant. When, for instance, she starts using colour film in the late 1950s, her approach becomes looser, more mischievous, as if she were entranced by the rich hues and deep, painterly tones as much as the subject matter.
 
Born in New York in 1926 to European immigrant parents, Maier was by all accounts an instinctive outsider, insular and guarded, but utterly driven in her vocation. As a photographer, she was removed from, but constantly alert to, the myriad small human dramas of the modernist city. That said, she was not a detached photographer nor a predatory one, her quiet attentiveness placing her in the creative company of the likes of Helen Levitt, rather than more confrontational street photographers such as Garry Winogrand.
 
The fact that Maier often brought her young charges along with her when she photographed may have added to her anonymity on the streets. The children must surely have been held to a vow of omertà for, as the documentary Finding Vivian Maier attests, even those who thought they knew her were utterly astonished by the audacity of her clandestine creative life. More striking perhaps, in terms of our contemporary fame-fixated culture, was her utter lack of interest in exhibiting her work, much less in embracing the attention that might have come with that kind of exposure. The making of it seems to have been fulfilment enough and no doubt brought its own solitary kind of freedom.

 
This distillation of her work creates a powerful sense of an artist on a journey of discovery entirely of their own making. Perhaps the most dramatic creative leap occurs when Maier starts shooting in colour and moves from the imposed formalism of a twin-lensed Rolleiflex camera, held at waist-height, to the freedom of a 35mm Leica with a viewfinder. The telling details she was drawn to throughout her career suddenly become more playful and textural: a woman’s legs outstretched on a brightly painted park bench; a closeup of a female waist, from which hang two handbags, one embossed with fake leaves, the other packed with brightly coloured flowers. Even more surprising is a formal study of a stylishly dressed woman and two children standing in a Chicago art gallery, which prefigures the kind of large-format, formal tableaux Thomas Struth began making in famous museums three decades later.
 
Maier’s portraits of children cannot help but be intriguing, given her day job. As the contemporary British photographer Vanessa Winship notes in a wall text, they tend to be “unflinchingly direct”. A case in point is a posed portrait of a young girl standing, arms crossed, in front of a shop window, her gaze so intent it takes a moment to notice her dirt-streaked face and eyes brimming with tears. It is a complex image, haunted and haunting, vulnerable but defiant.
 
Mostly, Maier photographed children as she did adults: as themselves, without artifice or sentimentality. They often inhabit the same urban milieu, long since disappeared, as their hard-bitten parents: untidy streets and sidewalks, tenement blocks and urban wastegrounds, where they pose, play and stare suspiciously, or stoically, at the strange, strait-laced lady with the camera.

 
It seems oddly fitting, if somewhat out of character, that the strange, strait-laced lady with the camera also appears in the work from time to time. Her self-portraits are by turns mischievous, knowing, almost ghostly and slyly, presciently conceptual. It’s as if she is saying: “Here I am, hiding in plain sight.”
 
In many ways, Maier was a woman apart and resolutely ahead of her time, stepping into the frame with a quiet self-assurance that may also, come to think of it, have underpinned her blithe indifference to any form of recognition or acknowledgment. Is that not, in itself, a supreme kind of self-belief?
 
At some point, around the beginning of the new millennium, Maier stopped making work, beset by financial difficulties. Homeless for a time, she was supported by a family that had once hired her as a nanny. Her archive languished in a storage facility until it was sold to pay off mounting rent arrears. She died, unnoticed and unsung, in 2009, aged 83, just two years after the discovery of her vast body of work and the beginning of her ongoing canonisation. The arc of her extraordinary life lends itself all too easily to romantic tragedy, but, from the evidence of her rich and varied body of work, Vivian Maier never doubted her own artistic worth. She just did it her way.
 
Vivian Maier: Anthology is at the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes until 25 September
 
 
Vivian Maier: Anthology review – the attentive, intimate images behind the myth.  By Sean O’Hagan. The Guardian, June 19, 2022. 

MK Gallery : Vivian Mayer Anthology

Vivian Maier was unknown as an artist during her lifetime. Wildly prolific, and with an eye and an attitude all her own, she left more than 150,000 photographs, some printed by herself, many processed as negatives and yet more still undeveloped and left in their canisters. They filled boxes and suitcases and trunks, which spilled out their contents in avalanches of film rolls and envelopes, carefully preserved and lodged in storage facilities until the money ran out on their lockers and they were auctioned off.

 
Eventually, and serendipitously, they began to come to light when Maier, late in life, was almost destitute and almost certainly mentally ill, more forgotten than remembered except to the families who had employed her as a nanny in Chicago, New York and Minneapolis. Remembered too by some of her subjects and the people she wandered among with her camera and her funny, old-fashioned clothes on the streets of the cities where she had spent her peculiar double life as a children’s nanny and compulsive photographer.
 
At some point Maier called herself a spy, and like any good spy she frequently changed the spelling of her name and gave herself different backstories depending on who asked. She holed herself up in the rooms she had been given by the families that employed her. She put sturdy locks on her doors and filled these quarters and upper rooms with her boxes and the towers of newspapers she accumulated and never threw away. Her employers tolerated and indulged her until they couldn’t, and as the children grew things often got difficult, so Maier would move on.
 
Her young charges also gave her something of an alibi when she took them to the streets on what she called “shooting safaris”. She may have taken the kids with her on these adventures during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, but Maier was no Mary Poppins. She led them to the Chicago stockyards where the animals were penned and slaughtered, and to the poorest parts of town, the ghettoes and the rows of shotgun houses, the tenements and the burnt-out lots in search of things to photograph as well as providing an alternative education to these privileged kids who until then barely knew what poverty was.
 
At a time when the American dream was falling apart, Maier was alert to the social and political conflicts of the nation. She was an outspoken feminist and encouraged independence of spirit in even casual acquaintances, who she would sometimes buttonhole for impromptu audio interviews. She never married and her friendships were few. We have little idea what she thought of other photographers, but it is telling that in one photograph here she took a picture of a family looking at paintings in the Art Institute of Chicago. She is not Robert Frank or Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus or William Eggleston, or Weegee or Enrique Metinides, although at times her work reminds you of these other photographers – either because of the subject matter or her framing or her use of colour – but however much we might think of her in the light of these better known photographers’ works she is always herself. How well she knew them, either from visiting exhibitions or in newspaper reviews of their works, is unknown.

 
Like the photographer herself, her art seems to have come out of nowhere, and more than a decade after her death in 2009, is still something of an enigma, although books have now been written and a film of her life is on Amazon Prime. Any exhibition about Maier must ask who was that woman, and must also ask how good was she as a photographer, how knowing or innocent, how purposeful was her art? With more than 140 black and white and colour images, as well as a number of films and audio recordings, the first large-scale show of her work in the UK, at MK gallery in Milton Keynes, is a complication and a delight. I laughed aloud at the grim, irresistible colour shot of a man’s bandaged head, his bald dome with a few sparse hairs peaking out at the top as he looks at a magazine page whose headline reads COME ON OVER. He is on a train, and Maier has photographed him from the row behind.
 
Two guys bend over a coiled hose on the wet sidewalk. One holds out his hand, as if he were tentatively about to touch a coiled snake. A burnt-up armchair squats in the street, and a realistic human doll sits, like an abandoned baby, at the bottom of a garbage pail. The news vendor snoozes in his kiosk, surrounded by shouting headlines and the magazine title Life repeated under his supporting elbow. He is sleeping through it all. A young black man rides a horse bareback under the elevated railway in New York in 1953. What grandeur this image has. Who wouldn’t stop to look? Overdressed ladies in veils, a guy with a cigar who might be smiling at the lunch he has had, Kirk Douglas attending the premiere of Spartacus, and Donald Koehler, at 2.49m (8ft 2in) the world’s tallest man, pausing to stoop and read the menu in a diner window. A fully clothed man sleeps on an empty Long Island beach, kids play in an alley, two hands tenderly touch, a homeless guy looks defeated. It is all here. Maier could do intimacy and distance, the head-on, the furtive, the inexplicable.

 
It is a snowy day in the suburbs, perhaps near where Maier lives. Everything is black and white and grey except the red light at the traffic stop, a tiny burst of colour like a bullet hole framed in the V between two tree trunks. Maier is described as a street photographer. Sometimes she photographed not the life on the street but the street itself, from the abstract signs on the tarmac, to the asphalt waterproofing on the rooftops, the neon in the puddles, the headlines and the funnies stacked up to be sold.
 

Shuttling between Chicago and New York, and taking us from the early 1950s until 1986, when she apparently stopped taking photographs, Maier not only recorded whatever came her way, she also recorded the interactions between photographer and subject. She frequently put herself in the frame. Sometimes Maier is a shadow on a wall or cast across a lawn sprinkled with buttercups. Here she is again, the shadow of her hat cast over the concrete-caked denim butt of a construction worker bending to his task, and the silhouette of hat, coat and handbag framed by a movie poster (Heaven Can Wait read the words above the shadow) on the side wall of a cinema. Her reflection is caught in a car’s wing mirror, on the window of a car door and on its glossy paintwork. She ghosts across shop windows and windscreens and on the fish-eye globe of a garden sprinkler. There she is again, caught on a pane of mirrored glass being hefted into a truck by a removal man. Her fleeting image, as well as her shadow, appears and reappears throughout this exhibition. Now in a diner’s mirror, expressionless, looking slightly upwards rather than at herself. The small girl beside her focuses on her nanny’s reflection in the mirror. As much as reflections, these are portraits of someone unknowable, framed by mirrors and framed in her photographs.

 
Maier constantly and repeatedly recorded her passage through the world, even in the surprised looks and hostile stares her subjects sometimes gave her. Occasionally she asked strangers to pose, and at other times denied ever having coerced anyone into being photographed at all. In her dowdy disguise and forthright approach, the square format Rolleiflex dangling at waist height in her hands, even the tough guys seemed to give her a break.
 
A kid holds the string attached to a helium balloon between her teeth, as if it were an empty yellow speech bubble, and a veteran with no ear and a rudimentary prosthetic mask makes a call on the street. We could talk of a compassionate eye but I’m not sure it helps or even if it is true. It was all the same to Maier and she didn’t flinch or pass by.
 
Vivian Maier: Anthology is at MK gallery, Milton Keynes, until 25 September.

Vivian Maier: Anthology review – the eccentric nanny with an eye for a picture. By Adrian Searle. The Guardian, June 14, 2022.

 

During the first Covid lockdown, I, like so many other people, took to wandering my neighborhood alone, observing details that I might otherwise have glossed over. Perfectly black irises in an otherwise colorful garden; street graffiti declaring “Black Lives Matter”; a root shoving up from beneath the sidewalk; the house down the street with seven-foot-long wooden dinosaur skeletons in the front yard; handmade posters stapled to telephone poles demanding that the state “Cancel Rent.” I took pictures of my shoes next to cracks in the sidewalk, fallen flowers, and, later, autumn leaves—and I took lots of pictures of myself, of course. I sent them to friends by text and WhatsApp or posted them to Instagram, where we all filled our grids with strangely empty cityscapes and wilderness. Did we record these images for ourselves or for the friends we were no longer able to see? Did we post them to feel connected or just to remember that we were still alive?
 
I thought of all this while reading Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, Ann Marks’s new book on the woman who became posthumously famous in the early 2010s for her beautiful and haunting street photography. So many of us became Vivian Maiers during the pandemic, wandering streets between the day’s work and taking pictures of anything and everything that struck us as pretty or funny or strange. Like Maier, we took photos not because we hoped to become famous artists or commercial photographers; we took them because we all had cameras in our pockets and nothing else to do.
 
In the 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier, John Maloof, credited with the titular discovery, goes searching for the woman whose beautiful photographs he bought at a storage auction, talking to her friends, her former employers, the children (now grown) that she cared for, a living relative. For him the question, above all others, was: Why didn’t Maier share her amazing works of art with others? Professional artists appear on-screen to declare that “had she made herself known, she would have become a famous photographer,” as if it is easy to make oneself known, as if “sharing” is something that today’s art world is even interested in, revolving as it does around asset purchases by the wealthy finessed by a legion of gatekeepers. Meanwhile, others wonder on-screen why Maier didn’t even share them with her family and friends—what was her motivation for taking these pictures?
 
Maloof and many of his interviewees are mostly confounded by these questions, but more confounded still by the idea that this great photographer was also a domestic worker. In Vivian Maier Developed, Marks also takes up these questions. A self-described “former corporate executive,” Marks sets out, detective-like, to uncover the story behind the photographs. “For me,” she writes, “no detail is inconsequential, and no question is left unanswered. My greatest passion is solving quotidian mysteries—the more convoluted, the better.” But her book still treats Maier’s life and art as a riddle to be solved rather than as the complicated and contradictory products of a formidable intellect. Marks may abandon Maloof’s thinly veiled contempt for Maier’s day job, but she nonetheless seems unable to situate Maier in a broader cultural and economic context, preferring to hunt for clues in her biography and even biology. Like Maloof, she misses the tension that could animate Maier’s story: that artists are not, in fact, from a different world, but live right here and do the tasks of social reproduction just like the rest of us.

 
Who was Vivian Maier? She was born in New York City in 1926 to a French immigrant mother and German Lutheran father, and her youth was divided between New York and a rural French village. She had an unstable home life: Her parents separated when she was young, and neither one was around much. What stability she did have came from her maternal grandmother, Eugenie, who found work in the homes of the wealthy as a cook. Because Eugenie, like many immigrant workers, had to put her job before her family, the emotional support she provided came with limits, and Maier and her mother often found a home with family friends—including the photographer Jeanne Bertrand, who was probably responsible for giving her access to a camera for the first time.
 
At age 6, Maier returned to France with her mother, beginning a relationship with the Champsaur Valley and her mother’s family that would inspire much of her photographic work. By age 12, she was back in New York, leaving France just ahead of World War II and returning to a city where, again, except for time spent with Eugenie, she was left to her own devices as a teenager and young adult.
 
What Marks calls Maier’s “forty-year career in photography” began when she returned to the Champsaur in 1950, age 24. She had come to settle a small inheritance, which gave her the freedom to spend her time photographing seemingly every inch of the valley and its people. In her early photographs, one can see her aesthetic and political judgments shaping up: attention to children and to the working class, interest in a communist rally and a film shoot, and plenty of self-portraits.
 
The inheritance mostly settled, Maier returned to New York and eventually secured a job as a governess to support herself and her photographic habit when her nest egg ran out. The caring jobs gave her flexibility and even made travel possible; she went to Cuba with one family and joined another on a cross-country road trip, taking pictures all the while. And she did so without much contact with the art world. At certain moments in her life—particularly when she lived in New York and later in California—Maier did spend time with other photographers, jostling for position in photo pools, shooting portraits of artists, and planning to create prints for sale. But most of the massive trove of work she produced in these years was for herself alone: 45,000 of her photos were never even developed, let alone printed.
 
Throughout these years, Maier may have been trying, though erratically, to become a professional photographer, but her ambition to make a living from her pictures seems to have waned by the time she reached Chicago in 1956. From then on, she continued to photograph and stockpile her pictures, but fewer of her clients seemed to know about their nanny’s creative pastime. Toward the end of her life, acquaintances commented on the sheer volume of stuff Maier had amassed, but few seemed to wonder if it could be worth anything. By the time she died, in 2009, at age 83, collectors had already begun to discover these photos, but Maier was never to know.
 
To be an artist, does someone have to view your work? Perhaps not—but to be recognized by the world as an artist, your work has to be deemed “art” by the kinds of people who are expected to make such judgments: gallery owners, collectors, other artists. Both Maloof and Marks subtly acknowledge this, marshaling famed photographers like Mary Ellen Mark and Joel Meyerowitz to explain why Maier’s work is valuable. Would it be possible for an unknown author like Marks to write a biography of an unknown nanny without “art” being involved? Unlikely.
 
For Marks, this “discovery” of Maier as an artist is as much the story as Maier’s own life is. She cheerily describes it as a tale of “colorful characters whose skills, tenacity, and scrappiness revealed [Maier’s] talent to the world,” but it is also a story about the contradictions in how our society values art. We expect artists to work for the love of it but are confounded by Maier’s seeming lack of interest in profiting from her pictures. Art is supposed to be its own reward, but Marks and Maloof and many of their art world interlocutors are baffled that Maier did not seek other rewards. We say that artists are those naturally endowed with special talent, yet that talent usually needs to be credentialed through an often expensive process of art school and galleries and wealthy collectors making purchases.
 
Indeed, by the time Maier’s photographs had been “discovered,” she had only a few years left to live and had stopped paying rent on the storage lockers where her photos were stashed. Maloof only found out the basic details of her life from her obituary and then reached out to the Gensburgs, her former clients, who had still more lockers full of photos. Maloof was able to persuade them to give him the whole stash rather than toss it, and shortly thereafter, he put on the first show of Maier’s work at the Chicago Cultural Center. Would she have wanted such a show? Those who knew her are conflicted; some say yes and others no. And the art world generates a different problem from this question: If Maier did not develop and print her own work, are the prints from her negatives authentic Vivian Maiers? Of course, artists do not create alone, and many famous photographers outsourced their printing—but without Maier there to supervise, how do we know she’d have considered the work hers? Then again, she had often simply dropped off her film at a neighborhood store, the same kind of place that most of us, in the pre-iPhone days, would have taken a roll of snapshots.
 
We should also ask: If Maier had created her pictures as a professional photographer would, making choices based on what might sell or who might buy, would her art have been the same? We can understand any piece of art, as the sociologist Howard Becker explains in his book Art Worlds, “as the product of a choice between conventional ease and success and unconventional trouble and lack of recognition.” But when you don’t aspire for recognition, might you make altogether different kinds of artistic choices?

 
The real star of Vivian Maier Developed, of course, is Maier’s photography. Marks’s book contains many photos, from color self-portraits to haunting black-and-white close-ups to cityscapes and Alpine landscapes. The artist’s unflinching eye calls to mind Diane Arbus, but Maier took up her camera a decade before Arbus’s rise to fame. Like Arbus, she trained her lens repeatedly on the unbeautiful, the poor, and the marginalized. Marks is ambivalent about Maier’s attention to these subjects, sometimes lauding her for choosing to photograph the “downtrodden” and at other times chiding her for “voyeurism.” She applauds Maier for treating poor Black and Native children just like rich white ones, as if this were surprising, but at the same time describes some of Maier’s other work as “predatory” and intrusive. Such an assumption—rather a lot from someone who is writing the life story of a person who may never have wanted the public attention in the first place—reminds us that art is still often seen as a masculine endeavor, that it is hard for so many to imagine that the skills that made Maier a good nanny also made her a great photographer. As Marks herself puts it: “Everyone mattered to Vivian.” She snapped celebrities and politicians, posed acquaintances like models, and captured the emotion, up close and personal, on the faces of small children. Rather than “predatory,” the word most of her pictures call to mind is “intimate.” The closeness to her subjects often feels less like a violation and more like an act of care.
 
A pair of photos taken a couple of months apart in 1951 and ’52 illustrate this dynamic. The first is a portrait of a Cuban worker with a mustache and a straw hat, shot on the trip that Maier took with an employer; the second is of Salvador Dalí, a slight scowl behind his famous mustache. Both men are shot from an angle that gives them a heroic stature, the worker as much as the legendary artist. Taking photos like this requires not predatory aggression but equal parts confidence and concern.
 
The question that haunts Marks’s book is, at bottom, the same one that haunted Maloof’s movie: Why didn’t Maier “share” her work? What neither of them quite grasps is that the question they are really asking is why she didn’t make money from it. Marks shows that early in her adult life, Maier had plans, though they were not realized, to start a postcard business, citing Maier’s letters to a French colleague who’d made samples from her landscapes. When she returned to New York, Maier purchased an expensive, professional-quality Rolleiflex camera designed for shots from the hip. She seems, too, to have occasionally sold prints for $1, though her haphazard record-keeping makes it unclear how many and to whom, and to have photographed the families she worked for. In one case, she took promotional photos of the steak house her clients owned. Marks also finds evidence that later in Maier’s life, her acquaintances sent her information about freelance work and a former employer wrote to her saying that she hoped Maier “would find an audience for her photography and collections.”
 
For Marks, the main hindrance to a photographic career was Maier’s perfectionism, but there are many other conclusions one could draw. The bits of information sprinkled throughout the book that indicate that Maier had connections and was recognized by others as a photographer—such as the fact, dropped on page 166 with no explanation and never mentioned again, that she “had a direct line to the Playboy Club’s publicity department”—do as much to undermine Marks’s preferred explanations as to support them. Despite Marks’s confident assertions, it remains unclear why Maier never became a full-time professional. Did she feel disheartened by her early attempts to become one? Did she decide instead to “work to live,” taking jobs as a nanny that allowed her to ramble, charges in tow, and snap whatever she wished? Did she shoot celebrities exiting the Playboy Club or on movie sets as work, or because she was a fan? Did the employers who expressed shock that she didn’t “share her photographs” ever offer to pay her for her creative work? To these questions, we have few answers.
 
Part of the problem is that Marks and Maloof cannot imagine why a talented photographer might choose a career as a care worker. Maloof’s film is laced with contempt for care workers; he snickers as he asks “why is a nanny” taking photographs, as if it’s inconceivable for the working class to have hobbies. Marks is not so much contemptuous of Maier’s care work as simply uninterested in why it might have appealed to her, or at least why it might have been the best of a bad set of options. Marks lays the story of Maier’s “family dysfunction” on thick, diving down a rabbit hole on her grandmother’s marriage and her mother’s and brother’s mental illnesses. But she misses some of the reasons why nannying may have filled a gap in Maier’s life. In a family that often treated her “as if she were wallpaper,” Marks writes, care may have been in short supply; by contrast, her most functional relative, her grandmother Eugenie, secured a decent life looking after the needs of the rich, and care work offered a kind of freedom that the other jobs open to a working-class woman of the time did not.

 
Marks also seems uninterested in the overlapping skill sets that Maier might have developed as a nanny and a photographer. Like most nannies, she would have been expected to lavish her charges with love and affection while receiving little in return. But it seems to occur to no one that Maier used the same skills to comfort her charges and to set a subject at ease, to fade into the background of her employers’ lives and to be an unobtrusive street photographer. Marks briefly notes that Maier’s “dispassionate demeanor” helped her photography by “diminishing her own presence,” but this too is a skill in the care laborer’s toolkit.
 
Whether Maier’s employers—some of whom were photographers or media personalities, including the talk show host Phil Donahue—took her photography seriously enough to see it as a bonus when they hired her, an extra skill to be exploited, or whether Maier sought out jobs in creative families, is perhaps unknowable. But in Marks’s book these are just more items in a jumble of details, as is the fact that at least one of Maier’s charges grew up to be a photographer herself.
 
 
The family that Maier was closest to, the Gensburgs, employed her for 11 years and remained close to her until the end of her life, cosigning for her final apartment and taking responsibility for her cremation. They, at least, described her lovingly, and photos of the family show Maier being uncharacteristically affectionate with the children. While other clients described her as standoffish—one claimed to never have known her name, referring to her only as “Mademoiselle”—the Gensburgs embraced her adventurousness, and leaving them seems to have been traumatic for Maier.
 
The philosopher Eva Kittay, in Love’s Labor, describes a life like Maier’s as one characterized by a “dialectic of dependency,” in which women are able to enter public space by taking on paid care work, even though such work stigmatizes them as dependents themselves, not part of “the fraternity of equals in political life,” even as it grants them other freedoms. When the paid caring relationship ends, as most of them do, the worker is left out in the cold, cut off from the home and family that until recently was theirs. When a family no longer needed a nanny, did Maier no longer need them? The Gensburgs, unlike many of her employers, seem to have recognized their debt to her. But the work that Maier did and the care she poured into it was often discarded quickly. What effect did her disposability have on her psyche and on her art?
 
 
The question of mental illness hangs over Marks’s portrait of Maier, intertwined with the question of why she kept her photos to herself. An early incident that Marks describes finds an employer complaining, “Mademoiselle must be mentally ill. Why else would she refuse to make copies? Making copies is how you make money with photography.” Disability, as Sunny Taylor and others have written, often makes one “unproductive” by the rules of capitalism, and many seem to have reversed this framework in their analysis of Maier: If she decided that she didn’t want to “make money with photography,” she must have had an impairment.

 
At times Marks seems to agree, though she ties herself in knots to argue more than this: that Maier was severely mentally ill, that she would have been a successful photographer if she hadn’t been so afflicted, yet also that she “lived the life she wanted to live” and would not want readers’ pity or their concern about her wishes regarding her work after her death. Maier, Marks writes, was considered “strange” and “abnormal” and a person with “underdeveloped social skills,” even if, Marks also notes, she showed “mastery at guiding conversations and deflecting questions.” Some of the children Maier cared for speculate about her discomfort with men and recall her intense reaction to being photographed when she was not in control of the picture, in one case apparently hitting a man with an umbrella. Marks also consults mental health experts to diagnose Maier posthumously. The use of the qualifier “may have” does a lot of work in these sections, as does the phrase “as if”: “It was as if she possessed a form of post-traumatic stress disorder related to potentially threatening men.” And at the end of the book, Marks simply states it as fact: “It was trauma and mental illness that drove many of her critical choices.”
 
Marks will no doubt consider me, in writing this, another part of the “well-intended art and feminist communities” who “drove matters offtrack early on by voicing long-standing biases against the attribution of mental illness to explain artists’ talent or women’s decision-making.” But I must raise the same challenge that Rose Lichter-Marck did in her excellent New Yorker review of Finding Vivian Maier in 2014: Why must we explain women’s unconventional lives “in the language of mental illness, trauma, or sexual repression, as symptoms of pathology rather than as an active response to structural challenges or mere preference”?
 
What is missing from Marks’s version of Maier’s life is, of course, the politics—or rather, it is scattered throughout her book like the political buttons found in Maier’s trove. Marks’s casual dismissal of “well-intended” feminist critiques is of a piece with her casual reference to Maier’s political worldview as “communist, socialist, and libertarian” (again, without evidence or explanation). It is simply not interesting to her as a biographer that Maier seems to have identified with the working class, or how those political views might have been shaped by her experiences as a nanny and an artist—and, in turn, may have shaped her photographic output and her decision, perhaps, to keep her photos to herself. Likewise, Marks makes casual reference to Maier’s feminism, but finds it useless as an analytical tool with which to understand her life.
 
Yet her politics is very much a part of what made Maier exceptional. At the height of the Red Scare, and before the civil rights struggle broke into the national headlines, she seems to have sought out leftist politics, identified as a feminist, supported Black freedom organizations and Native rights, and not only photographed children of color who were “just as charming,” in Marks’s words, as the rich white children she tended, but sought out political discussion and debate and even sabotaged her employers’ attempts to support right-wing causes. She covered labor rallies and political events like a journalist, even carrying a tape recorder to ask strangers and friends their opinions on the events of the day. “Many have observed that Vivian possessed an underdog’s perspective, and regardless of her circumstances, she identified primarily with the working class,” Marks notes, and Maier “kept literature like the ‘Bill of Rights for Working People’ and a critique of Washington Post union busting in storage.”
 
How these political views might have shaped her art and care work is, like so many other aspects of Maier’s story, not really a question we can answer. But it is in thinking politically—as Maier herself did—that we find the real challenges she poses. We should not treat her as an individual puzzle to be solved by digging up genealogies and photo store receipts, or view art as the domain of a select elite. What if the real lesson of Maier’s life as an artist and care worker and immigrant and politically active person is, following C.L.R. James’s assertion (written in 1956, as Maier was photographing Chicago with the Gensburgs in tow) that “every cook can govern,” it is also true that every nanny can make great art.

 
The story of Vivian Maier, then, is not a story about why one woman chose (or did not choose) to become an artist, but rather a story about how we all have art locked inside of us somewhere, how we are all capable of seeing and capturing the humanity of those around us, and that while only a few of us are ever lucky enough to be allowed the time and space for that art to come out and be recognized and pronounced “good” by the world, we can still go out onto the street with the cameras that nearly all of us carry now and, for just a moment, create a picture of something beautiful, whether we share it with the world or someone special or just keep it to ourselves. What if we understood that all of us—nanny, bus driver, journalist, teacher, even, yes, corporate executive—have an undeveloped trove of masterpieces within us? How, then, would we change the world?
 
Candids : The art of Vivian Maier.  By Sarah Jaffe   The Nation, May 30, 2022

If a picture were still worth a thousand words, we’d know more than enough by now about Vivian Maier, the so-called photographer nanny whose vast trove of images was discovered piecemeal and not fully processed, in all senses of the word, after her death at 83 in 2009, just as the iPhone was going wide.
 
Long before we were all carrying around those little wafers of pleasure and misery, Maier made constant companions of her Brownies, Leicas and Rolleiflexes. The ensuing record of her movement throughout the world — at least 140,000 negatives of landscapes, common folk, celebrities, children, animals and garbage — has more range and rigor than any influencer’s. Despite recurring selfies, some in noirish shadow, Maier was in fact the anti-influencer: Her startling compositions were not only largely unshared and unsponsored during her lifetime — she made abortive attempts to start a postcard business — but almost entirely unseen.
 
Their posthumous airing, and an ecstatic popular reception that began on the internet, has kept critics, lawyers and scholars busy.
 
A biography by Pamela Bannos published in 2017 suggested that the ragtag assortment of men who had unearthed and to some extent profited from Maier’s photographs — buying and selling them at auction, organizing popular exhibits and producing books and documentaries about her — were presumptuous to frame her story, let alone lay claim to it. (Maier is thought to have been deeply suspicious of men, as a general rule; she warned her young charges against sitting on their laps, and once so forcefully “decked” a guy trying to be helpful that he got a concussion).
 
A new biography, by Ann Marks, a former corporate executive with a background in analyzing “everyday people,” rejects this idea of exploitation. The book seeks to gently restore credit to those who put the photographer on the map — principally John Maloof, a real estate agent-turned-artist whose film “Finding Vivian Maier” was nominated for an Oscar. (Maloof seems to have emerged the intellectual-property victor from a nightmarish thicket of international copyright issues and competing advocates.) Marks believes Maier would have been pleased to be on that map, despite a life of obscurity that at times veered into squalor.
 
The difference of perspective may be moot. Just as you can’t libel the dead, you can’t ascribe intent to them; especially if, like Maier, they didn’t leave a will or outline their wishes to any intimates or have intimates.
 
Even those who employed Maier as a governess (“nanny” seems altogether too soft a term for her) and gave her rooms in their homes considered her strange, if not downright sinister in retrospect. Dodgy with references, occasionally resorting to corporal punishment and dragging minors around as she shot subjects such as naked mannequins and sheep marching to their slaughter in questionable parts of town, Maier would never be hired in our era of background checks, hyperscheduled activities and five-star reviews on care.com. (She was exceptionally loving to three boys in Chicago, the Gensburgs; they reciprocated by helping her in old age, eventually arranging to scatter her ashes in a forest preserve where they’d once picked wild strawberries. She also babysat briefly for Phil Donahue after his divorce, recording his broadcasts and later framing an article “featuring his proclamation that women were underestimated in television.”)
 
Parachuting into families with a spit-spot on-the-double briskness, Maier was inevitably compared to Mary Poppins or, zooming around on her moped, the Wicked Witch of the West. I flashed also on Ole Golly in “Harriet the Spy,” with her somewhat mannish affect, militaristic walk in clunky shoes and straight talk. Maier often costumed and characterized herself as a sort of spy.
 
Marks, with access and permissions that Maloof had denied to Bannos, tells Maier’s life with the intimacy of a scrapbook — and, at various points, the sanctioned intrusiveness of a detective log. Readers see Maier’s Liberty print blouses arrayed — she was an avid and discriminating shopper — and one of those big shoes measured. They learn of her odd grooming habits: washing her hair with vinegar and coating her face in Vaseline. And of her collections: Once her stack of newspapers, a major preoccupation, grew so heavy it buckled the floorboards.
 
Such hoarding, Marks convincingly argues, was a sign of mental illness, a likely explanation for the supposed mystery of Maier’s extreme privacy that should be fully aired and destigmatized, rather than shrugged off as mere eccentricity. “If Vivian had battled cancer, or even lesser physical afflictions like tremors, arthritis or lazy eye, these conditions would not have been dismissed as irrelevant to her photography,” she writes. “She would likely have been lauded for her fortitude in moving forward in the face of disability.”
 
Eager to follow this theory throughout the Maier bloodline, Marks sometimes displays the indiscrimination of that relative who has gone giddy on ancestry websites, tracing lineage until it blurs beyond recognition. “For me, no detail is inconsequential,” she writes in her introduction. Uh-oh, I thought. There and in multiple appendices describing research methods and roadblocks, she shows her work maybe a little overmuch.
 
But the bulk of “Vivian Maier Developed” is a thorough, fascinating overview of an artist working for art’s sake, and a forceful case for further exposure rather than discretion in the name of kid-gloved pity.
 
To add my own appendix: Marks’s selection of photographs, artifacts and documents is judicious and satisfying, but the book’s format reduces many to small squares. Bring a magnifying glass.
 
‘Vivian Maier Developed,’ an Intimate Biography of a Very Private Photographer.  By Alexandra Jacobs. The New York Times,  December  15, 2021

Honestly, my reaction when this process started was, oh, they're doing a movie on my crazy nanny who I never really liked," says Joe Matthews. The nanny's name was Vivian Maier, and she looked after Joe, his sister Sarah and brother Clark in the Chicago suburbs for three years in the 1980s.

 
The family knew that Maier was unusual and that she took a lot of photographs. Her attic bedroom was kept locked and packed full of boxes and newspapers. Joe's mother, Linda, says that she hired Maier, who was in her 50s, because she wanted someone she could respect as an equal: "I liked Viv because she spoke her mind so I knew what I was dealing with. We could disagree. I could say, 'No, I don't like doing things that way.' I thought she made a good partner."
 
But neither Linda Matthews nor any of the other families Maier worked for dreamed that soon after her death in 2009, their former nanny would be hailed as a key figure in 20th-century American photography. "The first time I saw her picture on television, I was stunned," says Linda. "I knew she was talented but it's astonishing what she made of it. Who could have imagined she could have left so much behind?"
 
Maier left behind more than 100,000 images, in hundreds of boxes of negatives and undeveloped rolls of film, as well as some Super 8 home movie footage, audio tapes and trunks full of memorabilia. Some of this was auctioned when Maier, who had fallen on hard times, could no longer keep up payments on a storage locker. One of the buyers was an estate agent and flea-market enthusiast called John Maloof. When he began to print the black-and-white street portraits that were her speciality, he was captivated. Vivian Maier's life and photography became his passion and, eventually, his living.

 
It was years before Maloof could attract interest in Maier's work. The first time he searched for her name on the internet he found nothing and it was only by chance that when he tried again in 2009 he found a brief obituary. Spurred on by the warm response to a photography blog he put together, he began writing to museums and, when these approaches were rejected, put on his own exhibition. Now he has made a film, Finding Vivian Maier, which pieces together her life story and makes a case, heartfelt if not disinterested (as Maloof owns the copyright), for her as an artist of comparable importance to great names of 20th-century American photography such as Diane Arbus, Robert Frank and Weegee.
 
Maier shot glamorous women shopping and dramatically lit buildings. A letter found among her possessions suggests that she may on occasion have worked for a newspaper. But most of the celebrated images that now sell for thousands and hang on gallery walls depict people on the powerless fringes of society: African Americans, children, the old and the poor.
 
Her camera, a Rolleiflex, was operated at chest level, which allowed the photographer to maintain eye contact with the person whose picture she was taking. Many of her strongest and most memorable shots are of people staring straight at her.
 
So what was it like to be looked after by this remarkable character who described herself as a "mystery woman" and "sort of a spy"? Joe Matthews and Sarah Ludington, six and nine respectively when Maier arrived, and their mother, Linda, share their memories of Maier in three conversations that are intriguing for the different lights they throw on her.
 
"As an adult I would say she was a person who had a lot of baggage, literally and figuratively," says Joe. "It was so bizarre. I went into the attic maybe three times the whole time she was my nanny and the stacks of newspapers were taller than me. It was like walking through a valley of newspapers."
 
His sister got more out of the long city walks on which Maier took them after school, with their baby brother, Clark. "I was a solitary child and didn't have many friends, so the time I spent with Viv was what I had to do," Sarah says. "I liked the walks. By the end, I would be in pain. We were walking probably 10 miles which when you're little is a long way, but often she would take us to the beach at the end."
 
The children knew that the main purpose of these outings was not for their benefit but to take pictures. "Many of her subjects I recognise," Sarah says. "The one that sticks in my head is the picture she took of a man whose face was burned off, whom we often saw. I remember seeing him as a child and wondering if I should look or not. I remember thinking about that. She truly did look at people in a different way and was not afraid to look."
 
"I don't think she liked kids at all really," says Joe. "I think she liked images. When she saw an image she had to capture it. I think it was the same compulsive behaviour that made her hoard newspapers. My brother probably got on best with her. He was so little and has always been a good-natured boy. I was the trouble-maker, testing and teasing her. I always got the feeling that what she wanted to do was take photos and hauling the kids around was just a chore."
 
In the film, Linda Matthews is tearful when describing Maier's departure: Vivian, known to the family as Viv, came home one day to find that a pile of her newspapers was missing. She lost her temper with Linda and the neighbour who had taken the papers to cover the floor while redecorating.
 
Linda sacked her. "I felt very bad about it, I thought maybe we would stick together for a few more years but my husband also felt we were at the point where we had to do something," she says. "You can't forget this is someone's livelihood and I didn't dismiss her lightly but there was an accumulation of small things. She let the children wander off so they got lost. There was nothing I could do to keep them from growing up and I could see they were having a harder time."
 
Born in New York in 1926, Maier spent much of her childhood in the French Alps before returning to the US and working in a sweatshop before starting up as a nanny. In 1960, she travelled to Asia but, apart from this trip, remarkable for a single woman of her background at that time, she mostly lived for 40 years with the families she worked for in Highland Park, Chicago.
 
Maloof and his co-director, Charlie Siskel, interview several of these families in their film. Several times interviewees contradict each other: she was Miss Maier, Miss Meyer, Vivian or Viv. She was great with kids, or harsh and uninterested. She was secretive, had no desire for publicity, or frustrated by her situation. She was mentally ill, ruled by an impulse to collect or a smart talker with strong political views and a sense of humour.
 
Siskel thinks the role of nanny may have suited her in some respects, sharpening her perspective as an observer. But he was troubled by the testimony included in the film of Inger Raymond, who describes Miss Maier as her governess from the age of five to 11.
 
Among more unpleasant memories, Raymond recalls Maier force-feeding her: "She would hold me down, she would shove the food in and she would choke me until I swallowed – and she would do that over and over again." She also describes having her head banged against a bookcase, while Joe Matthews says his brother's only memory of their nanny is of being spanked for spilling a glass of milk.
 
Such outbursts, combined with her isolation, estrangement from her family and what he perceived as hostility to men, make Joe Matthews suspect some trauma in Maier's own past and possibly abuse.

 
It is sad as well as perplexing that the woman who had such a knack for capturing human moods and expressions in her photographs, and showed such tenacity and originality in making her work, should have passed her whole life without forming intimate relationships of her own. In her last years she was a pitiful figure, often seen on a bench in a park, eating corned beef hash from a can.
 
One day in 2006, by now married and a mother herself, Sarah Ludington bumped into Maier in a fabric store, "I walked up to her and said 'Hello, Viv!' which I never would have done as a child. She told me she was looking for a job and asked if I would hire her to take care of my babies."
 
Ludington's reaction was shock – not at the proposal from a woman of 80, but, "I realised that after all these years maybe I would consider it. With so many difficult and unusual creative people there are trade-offs. But she did what she thought was important. She offered me a lot and I guess in the end I'm not surprised that she had more up her sleeve."
 
Our nanny, the photographer Vivian Maier. By Susanna Rustin. The Guardian, July 19, 2014

When John Maloof, a real-estate agent, amateur historian, and garage-sale obsessive, acquired a box of photographic materials and personal detritus at an auction in suburban Chicago in 2007, he quickly realized that he had stumbled upon an unknown master of street photography. But despite his vigorous snooping, he could find no record of Vivian Maier, the name scribbled on the scraps of paper that he found among the negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of film. He tracked down the rest of the boxes emptied from an abandoned storage garage, amassing a collection of hundreds of thousands of frames shot in New York, Chicago, France, South America, and Asia between the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-seventies. Two years after he bought the first box, he Googled the name again and, to his surprise, found an obituary announcing that Vivian Maier had died only a few days before. The short text had just enough information for Maloof to deduce that Maier had worked as a nanny in suburban Chicago.
 
In “Finding Vivian Maier,” a new documentary about Maloof’s discovery that he directed with Charlie Siskel, interviews with Maier’s former charges, now middle-aged, do little to diminish the wondrous peculiarity of her story. They remember her as a woman of contradictory impulses: she was uncompromising yet playful, endlessly curious yet intensely private, and, despite being a caretaker, could be aloof to the point of callousness, even cruelty. Although none of her charges seemed to realize that she was amassing a vast body of vital work, they remember countless day trips to the seedy streets of Chicago; the daunting bustle of downtown; the boredom that set in when Maier would linger too long, taking what seemed like endless pictures of one thing.
 
With a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera held inconspicuously at hip-height, Maier captured fleeting moments and turned them into something extraordinary. One scowling lady fixes another’s wrinkled veil; a child with grimy cheeks and tear-filled eyes defiantly crosses her arms in front of a window display of draped gloves; a nun waits in the shadows; a prostrate inebriate cups his forehead; a young man rides an absurdly large horse under the El. Doorways, parking spots, bus stops, industrial neighborhoods, movie-theater box offices, city parks, suburban dead ends, train platforms, empty restaurant tables, storefronts, newspaper stands—she photographed the in-between, unexamined places.

 
“Why would a nanny be taking all these pictures?” Maloof asks in “Finding Vivian Maier.” His puzzlement reflects the central anxiety of the film, and of the Maier legend in general. Why would a photographer with the fierce dedication, creative vision, and formal skill of a Robert Frank, a Diane Arbus, or a Garry Winogrand withhold her work from the world and choose instead to spend her life raising other people’s children?
 
For filmmakers, for her fans, and for the people who knew her when she was alive and now must reconcile that elusive figure with her posthumous reputation as an artist, Maier’s story is titillating precisely because of how it deviates from the familiar narratives about artistic aspiration. They can’t understand why she never put aside her profession for her passion. People who never saw her without a Rolleiflex around her neck express bewilderment that they were in the company of a great talent. (“She was a nanny, for God’s sakes.”)
 
In the film, domestic work is placed in opposition to artistic ambition, as if the two are incompatible. But are they? Street photographers are often romanticized as mystical flâneurs, who inconspicuously capture life qua life, who are in the world, but not of it. The help, like the street photographer, is supposed to be invisible. Menial tasks like child care have, historically, been relegated to working-class women, who give up domestic autonomy to live in intimate proximity to their employers while remaining employees. In the best circumstances, a nanny becomes a trusted member of the family and allows her identity and independence to be entwined with, even subsumed by, the people for whom she works. In the worst circumstances, she is expendable, replaceable; her bath-time instructions and dinnertime offerings and bedtime kisses are tasks just as easily completed by the helpers who precede or follow her. Both the photographer and the nanny evoke fantasies of invisibility that rely on the erasure of real labor, but for opposite ends. “Women’s work” is diminished and ignored while the (historically male) artist’s pursuit is valorized as a creative gift. Perhaps the nanny could be the perfect person to photograph the world unnoticed. Maybe the very thing that made people hire her as a nanny—her watchfulness, her “alertness to human tragedies and those moments of generosity and sweetness,” as the photographer Joel Meyerowitz puts it in the film—made her the artist we know she was.

 
It seems that, for Maier, the nanny’s life allowed her to be with people, but not of them. She actively cultivated her own unknowability, perhaps as a way to maintain this separateness. She never spoke of a desire to make a living as a photographer. In Chicago, where she lived for decades, she refused to give film processors and pawn shopkeepers her real name, instead handing out fake names all over town. She demanded separate locks for her rooms in her employers’ homes, and forbade anyone from ever entering her space. She didn’t mention family or old friends. She lied about where she was born, claiming France as her homeland (she was born in New York City in 1926), and spoke with a contrived Continental accent that no one could place. She dressed in an outdated style, or, as one interviewee put it, “like a Soviet factory worker from the nineteen-fifties.” In the film, an acquaintance recalls asking her what she did for a living. Her response: “I’m a sort of spy.”
 
 
Most people who hear about Maier might agree with the photographer’s pawnshop broker, who tells the filmmakers, “I find the mystery of it more interesting than the work itself.” The filmmakers give Maier’s purposeful obscurity and fiercely guarded solitude a tragic cast: Her former charges recall her “dark edge,” the way she spoke about the brutality of men, the temper that, on occasion, bordered on abusive. Her old employers described how she filled her quarters with hoarded treasures and towering piles of yellowing newsprint. She was obsessed with newspapers in particular; one woman recalls how Maier went nuts upon realizing that a neighbor had taken old editions out of the house in order to finish a painting job.
 
 
Her archives of pictures, films, and voice recordings reveal a fascination with rape and murder, urban blight and the ravages of poverty, the brutality of the city stockyards, political unrest. The film implicitly suggests that there is something off about this, that her interest in “I told you so” stories, the ones that revealed “the folly of humanity,” “the bizarreness of life, the unappealingness of human beings,” as one of her charges describes it, is symptomatic of a haunted, morbid psychology. The insinuation is that interests in such subjects is inherently unseemly, even though these are the kinds of stories that have captivated journalists for eons.

 
“Finding Vivian Maier” shows that stories of difficult women can be unflattering even when they are told in praise. The unconventional choices of women are explained in the language of mental illness, trauma, or sexual repression, as symptoms of pathology rather than as an active response to structural challenges or mere preference. Biographers often treat iconoclastic women like Yoko Ono, Marie Curie, Emily Dickinson, and Vivian Maier as problems that need solving. They’re problems as in “How do you solve a problem like Maria,” to borrow an allusion from an Ariana Reines’s essay about another often simplified woman photographer, Francesca Woodman.
 
There’s no disputing that Maier was peculiar and prickly, and that her interests spanned the benign and the morbid. But she was neither a Mary Poppins nor a surrogate Mommie Dearest. The people who knew her described an impenetrability that, even in retrospect, threatens the fantasy that people who choose to care for children are all hugs and rainbows. Her story suggests the unsympathetic possibility that a woman might choose something like nannying because it has an economic rather than emotional utility. As Janet Malcolm writes in her New Yorker essay about the Bloomsbury Group, “A House of One’s Own,” “Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image.” So let’s consider “Finding Vivian Maier” in reverse: Maier challenges our ideas of how a person, an artist, and, especially, a woman should be. She didn’t try to use her work to accumulate cultural or economic capital. She was poor but uninterested in money: when Maloof went through her possessions, he found thousands of dollars in uncashed Social Security checks. She didn’t marry or have children, and, when people mistakenly called her Mrs. Maier, she would reply, “It’s Miss Maier, and I’m proud of it,” echoing another female artist, who often instructed strangers not to call her “Mrs. Stieglitz” but “Miss O’Keeffe.” She died before developing more than a thousand rolls of exposed film, and there is no proof that she ever made a concerted effort to show her work to any dealers or other artists. To suggest that her choices were the result of some as yet uncovered emotional trauma is to assume that her life was lived in reaction to pain. But this shoehorns her into the very conventions of capitalism and bourgeois values that she eschewed so aggressively.
 
When she was a girl, she briefly lived in close quarters with a noted female photographer, Jeanne Bertrand, who may have taught the young Maier how to take pictures. I wonder what Maier learned from her, what she told her about trying to be an artist. I wonder what kinds of opportunities would have existed for Maier decades later, and which of the same impediments. Maier had neither money nor connections, but she had control over how she lived, what she looked at, and what she photographed.

 
Maier was not a closed-off shut-in like Henry Darger, another Chicago artist canonized after his death. Her photographs of the urban and suburban streets track the fluctuations of the economy, the growth of the city, the cycles of the seasons, the emotions in the faces of the children she cared for, the way her own body advanced through the years. She chose her job not because she especially loved children but because of the life it enabled her to have, what it allowed her to see. She valued her freedom above all. Her art and profession have more in common than it may initially seem. She was a perpetual outsider, and she liked it that way. She moved among people but did not belong to any of them. She was close but not entangled. She could always walk away. In the documentary, when Maloof describes how Maier spent the late fifties and sixties, travelling and photographing the world alone, this did not strike me as the least bit sad. It seemed that, on those trips, Maier was the most free she had ever been, and ever would be. That’s how she wanted to see herself. And she did.
 
Some tellings of Maier’s story suggest that perhaps we should feel a proxy regret, that we should feel sorry about her solitude, her rages, her dark edges, her impecunious existence. Shall we make her a martyr or can we allow that she may have had the life she wanted? How did she see herself? We know that she was looking at that, too—the copious self-portraits prove it. She often photographed her own sphinx-like expression in the reflection of bathroom mirrors, car windows, shop windows, shards of glass and curves of aluminum. She captured her shadow creeping across the frame to touch an empty sidewalk, a lone horseshoe crab, a flowering lawn. These pictures help me to understand, finally, that Maier isn’t invisible, except to us. She was looking at herself all along.
 
Vivian Maier and the Problem of Difficult Women. By Rose Lichter-Marck. The New Yorker, May 9, 2014. 

 

Vivian Maier : Official website