John Maloof and Charlie Siskel (2013)

She ended her life a ‘dumpster diver’ in the Chicago suburb where she lived but Vivian Maier has become, posthumously, an internationally renowned photographer.  I knew that her work had been discovered only recently; and that these recent events and Maier’s life story were thought interesting enough for John Maloof and Charlie Siskel to make this documentary.  I didn’t know how big a name she’d become in the photography world – and I think Maloof and Siskel’s film was a stronger experience for me as a result of this ignorance.   Finding Vivian Maier is fascinating, the first half entirely and especially so.  In 2007, Maloof, aged only twenty-six but a veteran of auctions (since childhood), bought a collection of prints and negatives at an auction house sale, hoping they might include something useful for a book about Portage Park in Chicago on which he was working.   The lot included some 30,000 pictures, in print or negative form.  When Maloof googled the name of the photographer, Vivian Maier, he drew a blank – and continued to do so until he discovered an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune shortly after her death, at the age of eighty-three, in April 2009.  Maloof is an agreeable scene-setter and narrative companion; his growing obsession with Maier is absorbing too but not nearly so absorbing as the statistics of what he eventually acquired.  The lot originally bought proved to be the tip of an iceberg.  Maloof’s eventual haul[1] comprised close to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 prints, hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, and audio tape interviews that Vivian conducted, asking supermarket shoppers what they thought of big political issues of the day, and so on.

Vivian Maier, who spent most of her working life as a nanny and housekeeper, was an inveterate and seemingly indiscriminate hoarder.  Inside the suitcases and trunk she left behind were, along with her prodigious photographic input, numerous travel tickets (for journeys both local and international – she visited many countries in her youth), multifarious receipts, all sorts of bric-à-brac.  And newspapers:  one of her ex-employers, interviewed by Maloof and Siskel, describes how the mountains of these not only occupied every inch of space in Maier’s living quarters but also encroached on other parts of the family home.   The film-makers’ selection of newspaper headlines suggests that Vivian had a particular interest in sensational and violent crimes.   But, from the start, the drop-in-the-ocean examples of her street photography tell a different, larger story.   The talking heads in Finding Vivian Maier also include two eminent photographers, Joel Meyerowitz and Mary Ellen Mark, who commend Maier’s eye for eccentricity and tragedy, and the compassionate quality present in much of her work.  Meyerowitz helpfully explains that the Rolleiflex camera Maier favoured was ideal for covert photography on the streets of Chicago (and, earlier in her life, New York):  the Rolleiflex user shoots ‘upwards’ rather than at the level of what’s being photographed.   While a good many of her subjects were therefore caught on camera unawares, it’s clear from the startled or hostile expressions of some that they realised just too late what Maier was doing.  Two middle-aged women, one of her former charges and the latter’s girlhood friend, describe how embarrassed they were by Maier’s inevitable camera, how they sometimes wanted to ‘hit her over the head with it’.  And Meyerowitz himself, in one of his later comments, talks admiringly of Maier’s intuitive understanding of how much she could encroach on the space of the person she was photographing – of what she captures on camera representing an intersection between the subject’s vitality and her own.

Vivian Maier was a highly secretive person.  She used many (it seems mostly unimaginative) pseudonyms.  Yet she didn’t hide herself entirely:  she’s present in a good number of her photographs; she appears in some of the home movie footage; her voice is heard in audio recordings.  Although it’s no surprise that she didn’t show her photographs to anyone, she didn’t either, unless I missed it, actually refuse to do so.  If that’s right, it suggests that those among her employers who knew about Maier’s camera were not interested enough to ask to see the nanny’s snaps.   Those in the cinema audience will be more curious:  you naturally want, like John Maloof, to know more about her personal history and, especially, her earlier life.   There’s disagreement among the contributors as to whether her ‘French accent’ was genuine or an affectation or part of a carefully constructed identity, although the cadence of her English-speaking voice, as well as her name, sounded more German than French to me.  It transpires that Vivian’s father was Austrian but that she, a native New Yorker, spent time during childhood and adult life in the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur, her French mother’s family home, and took some remarkable photographs of the people there, including relatives.  An archivist in the New York records department tells of the evidence he’s found that Vivian, who never married, was far from the only member of her family who came to lead a solitary existence.  There are also anecdotes that suggest that she had a pathological aversion from men and inferences are drawn that she may have suffered sexual abuse in her younger life.  One of the girls in her charge (the same one who wanted to hit her over the head with the camera) claims she was physically abused by the nanny.  (This may be true although, if so, it prompts the question of how the girl’s parents didn’t notice the bruises that must have resulted from the treatment that’s described.)  Others nannied by Vivian were evidently and lastingly grateful to her.  It was the sons of a family she’d worked for in the early 1960s who, in her impoverished old age four decades later, set her up in an apartment in the Rogers Park area of Chicago and paid the bills.

While these biographical facts are of real interest, they somehow detract from the mystery of Vivian Maier that’s created through the story of how John Maloof came by her work, the fact that the people she worked for knew so little about her, and the work itself.  The implication that keeping material evidence of everything that her life contained was a compensation for its emotional isolation and the meagreness of her personal relationships is a familiar one (albeit that the assemblage of material is visually expressive and emotionally powerful).  You sense too that Siskel and Maloof had, by the time they came to make this film, moved beyond the latter’s intense curiosity about the facts of Maier’s life.  (For example, although you’re told the circumstances in which she parted company with a couple of the families for whom she worked, there’s not enough information to discern a consistent pattern.)  The film-makers’ understandable instinct is to return repeatedly to the photographs; whenever they do, your fascination with both the creator of these images and her camera subjects is immediately renewed.

Vivian Maier has, within the first few minutes of the film, come to epitomise an unsuspected life and talent.  She may well have had, as is claimed, a particular affinity with people who were poor, or otherwise marginalised, but her subjects are varied in terms of age, ethnicity and social standing.  As John Maloof has said, ‘Elderly folk congregating in Chicago’s Old Polish Downtown, garishly dressed dowagers, and the urban African-American experience were all fair game for Maier’s lens’.  But none of those she photographed was well known and, without Maier, they would have disappeared without trace except from the memories of those who knew them (many of whom will now be dead).  The photographer and the people in her photographs together form a kind of community of secret lives; yet the fact that plenty of them didn’t know they were being photographed creates a fine tension.  One interviewee recalls an occasion when Maier, explaining to him her reluctance to use her real name, described herself as ‘a kind of spy’.   He goes on to say that he thought the last person to use such a pretext would be a real spy but Maier’s self-description seems right to me.  She’s elusive in another way too:  her face, which I don’t think I’d seen before, always looked oddly familiar but if I tried to work out who exactly she reminded me of, I never could (although several names came to mind: Frances de la Tour, Allison Janney, Virginia Woolf …)

A now elderly shopkeeper, who describes what a pain Vivian was as a customer (ordering bits and bobs but refusing to supply contact details so she could never be informed when her order had arrived), expresses frustration that Maier’s photographs don’t tell you more about her.  This woman is a vivid interviewee but I disagree with what she says.  In a snatch of audio recording, Vivian, asked why she won’t say who she is, replies, ‘I’m the mystery woman’, and a child’s giggle is then heard.  The combination of those words and that giggle provides a perfect summary of how Vivian Maier lived her life.  From among those who knew her, there’s plenty of speculation and considerable difference of opinion as to what she would have thought about being discovered.  On the evidence of Finding Vivian Maier, I think I’m with one of her former charges who reckons she’d have been both gratified that her work has been seen by so many and relieved that this didn’t happen during her lifetime – that she didn’t have to cope with the emotional strain of public exposure.

19 June 2014

[1] According to Wikipedia, the Maloof Collection isn’t the whole story either:  ‘In the spring of 2010, Chicago art collector Jeffrey Goldstein acquired a portion of the Maier collection from one of the original buyers. Since Goldstein’s original purchase, his collection has grown to include 17,500 negatives, 2,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and numerous slides.’