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Finding Vivian Maier. Written and directed by John Maloof & Charlie
Siskel. At selected theaters.
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| Vivian Maier, woman on the street. |
There's a long list of major artists
who died in obscurity. Vincent van Gogh, El Greco, and Franz Kafka eventually
earned their champions, but the process took years, with full appreciation coming
generations later. In all these cases, it was the influence of experts—critics,
exhibitors, historians—who led the way for an indifferent public.
By this measure, the photographer
Vivian Maier has been spectacularly lucky. Her rise to fame began the very year
she died, when her street photographs began appearing on the internet. Popular
acclaim, not expert opinion, prompted more postings, and more interest, until
today she's where it took Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe decades to reach.
Now she's the subject of Finding Vivian
Maier, a documentary by John Maloof, the historian who first lucked into a
cache of her negatives in 2007.
Maier (born 1926) was indeed a strange
figure. She worked virtually her entire life as a nanny. She pursued her
hobby—photography—in plain sight of her employers, yet never showed her work to
anyone. She had no family of her own, and made few friends outside the children
she cared for. She never threw anything away, from the most worn-out pair of
shoes to the most minor of dry-cleaning receipts. She may have sported a phony
French accent. When she died she left some 150,000 negatives behind, the vast
majority of which she neither developed nor printed. According to Maloof, she
once made what seems like a half-hearted attempt to exhibit her work in France,
but nothing came of it. She died from complications of falling on some ice in
2009.
Of her talent there's no doubt. Shooting
from waist-level with a Rolleiflex camera, she captured images of street life
that pulse with compassion, intimacy and humor. People seem unguarded in
Maier's work in a way they rarely are in period photos. She accomplished this
for the same reason she went through her personal life virtually unnoticed: by
being something of a ghost, no more of a presence than she needed to be. Like
Emerson's "transparent eyeball", she "[stood] on the bare
ground…head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite spaces, all
mean egotism vanished…I am nothing; I see all."
Though her life was undistinguished,
Maier is fortunate to have Maloof as the custodian of her legacy. Boyishly
earnest, persistent, and energetic, he has couched his documentary as a burning
mystery, as in "Why did such a towering talent lay hidden for so
long?" One big reason—the reticent strangeness of Maier herself—is
obvious, but there's a sense here that that's not enough, as if talent has some
inherent right to be appreciated.
The "mystery" angle on Maier's life
is unnecessarily ginned-up. Even if, as Maloof argues, she was aware her work
was good, there's a long way between being good to being confident enough to
expose yourself to the world. Indeed, anonymity may have been Maier's best way
of preserving her belief in her talent. For anyone struggling with an addiction
to making art, there's nothing about Vivian Maier that's mysterious at all.
©
2014 Nicholas Nicastro
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