If you haven’t heard of Vivian Maier, you're hardly alone. It's something of a miracle that anyone has, even though she stands among the best street photographers of the 20th century.
Maier made tens of thousands of intimate, humorous, and powerful portraits over the course of her life, and shoved them all into boxes that went undiscovered until a serendipitous $300 bid at an auction in 2007. It was only after Maier's death in 2009 that people recognized the genius of her photos, which can hang alongside those of Robert Frank, Dianne Arbus, or Henri Cartier Bresson.
Finding Vivian Maier tells the story of her long life (she died at 83) and exquisite work, and chronicles the immense task of piecing the story together from the clues she left behind. No less fascinating is the story of the film's co-director, John Maloof, who placed that winning bid and worked hard to bring Maier's work the global recognition he’s certain it deserves.
Maloof purchased a box containing 40,000 negatives of photos Maier made in the 1960s. He hoped to use them to illustrate Portage Park, a book he co-authored about life on the city’s northwest side. The photos didn't suit his needs, but Maloof grew so obsessed by them that he left real estate to take up photography. Unsure what else to do with the pictures, he posted a selection of them online and created a Flickr thread asking, "what do I do with this stuff?" The thread blew up, and Maloof realized just what he’d stumbled on: A one-of-a-kind historical document and trove of unseen world-class art.
Maier’s photos, snapped mostly with the boxy Rolleiflex camera perpetually dangling from her neck, are clever, idiosyncratic, and sensitive to the absurd nuances of daily life--qualities of a great street photographer. But her talent, sense of humor, and physical appearance (Maier took her share of selfies) are all we learn about her from the pictures alone. Maloof needed to dig for everything else.
One of the great achievements of this documentary is the DIY detective work Maloof and fellow filmmaker Charlie Siskel did in piecing together the narrative of a deliberately mysterious woman. Using every resource he could think of--including scouring Google images to match the steeples seen in some of Maier's photos with those seen in the French countryside-–the sudden documentarian guides us through the story of Maier’s life. His passion for telling the story is contagious, and it's easy to share his excitement over each new tidbit of information. The picture that emerges is, like her work, sometimes charming, and sometimes all too real.
Maier was born in New York and made her living as a nanny there and in Chicago, probably because the job allowed her time to make pictures. The children, now grown, that she cared for and many of their parents provide the most insight. They describe Maier as intelligent, adventurous, and intensely private. She had also mastered the photographer's balance of being curious and bold while remaining aloof and removed. She also could be irritable and temperamental, prone to strange (even violent) outbursts that sometimes cost her jobs. Through it all, she never quit taking photos, even if meant bringing her young charges to the shopping center, slum or slaughterhouse she felt like shooting that day.
Her compulsive chronicling of the world around her expanded to include color photography and film; reels and reels of audio tape feature guerrilla interviews conducted in supermarket lines. Maier also was a bona fide hoarder, stacking newspapers in her rooms until the floors literally sagged. Early in the film Maloof lays out artifacts, acquired from storage lockers and other buyers at the 2007 auction, and they cover the entire floor. The material includes more than 100,000 negatives; thousands of notes, receipts, newspaper clippings; and countless marginalia. There was a lot to unravel, let alone weave into a coherent story, and the filmmakers do a great job bringing it all together.
Some reviews have panned Finding Vivian Maier for being little more than an advertisement for the publishing business Maloof has built upon her photos. He briefly addresses this in the documentary, arguing that with Maier dead and no estate to represent her, there is no one else to champion her work. In the film, he reads the rejection letter the MoMA sent him early in his project. Whether the project is driven by duty or profit ultimately doesn't matter, because it's a fascinating story told well, and we're lucky Maier's photos fell into the hands of someone with the will and the means to ensure people saw them.
Another relevant question is whether Maier would wanted the attention. The film makes abundantly clear just how obsessed she was with privacy. Maloof acknowledges this conundrum, but finds justification with the discovery (accompanied in the film by a soaring string section soundtrack) of a single note to a small photo printing shop in a tiny village in France. In it, Maier suggests going into business with the printmaker to create postcards from some of her photos. Her humble proposal may not indicate anything akin to interest in the vast publicity campaign that's made her posthumously popular, with her likeness and photos circulating the globe under the Maloof Collection emblem.
Still, without Maloof's work, the odds that Maier's amazing body of work would ever be widely seen are miniscule. It isn't easy getting people to notice, much less celebrate, a new name in the arts. The photographers so often invoked to describe Maier's work had time to define their era and influence later generations of photographers. Her work has the legitimacy to be no less influential, but lacks the cultural currency. That is changing, however, with the reach of the internet. Finding Vivian Maier is therefore not just an account of a gifted photographer's life, but a call for the art establishment to take her work seriously.
In that way, it has a chance of adding a name to the canon of great street photographers. That is an achievement worth celebrating.
