UK Edition
Review
Vivian Maier was a brilliant photographer – so why did she hide her work?
The Chicago nanny died without a soul knowing she was one of the 20th Century's most extraordinary chroniclers of street life
The remarkable one-off story of Vivian Maier, which has been with us for a decade or so now, has a mystery at its heart. How can any creative artist be content to produce great work that no one will ever see?
Maier, who was born in 1926 and spent most of her life working as a nanny, rarely left home without a camera. The streets of New York, then Chicago, were her principal subject. For decades she would sneak up with a Rolleiflex or Leica, both usefully discreet, and snap anyone who caught her eye – old ladies, kids, cops, hoodlums, tramps, freaks, stars, protestors, presidents.
The results – beautiful, funny, grim or glorious – are always alive to the great human carnival. But while some of her employers were vouchsafed the odd snap, none of her photographs was ever published or shown in a gallery. Only a tiny minority – 2,000 – of the 140,000 images she took were printed. The rest she never even saw herself, except through the viewfinder. Instead she kept them undeveloped in boxes stored in warehouses which, when she stopped paying the fees, were auctioned off. She died alone and unheralded soon after.
How her oeuvre came to light was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, Finding Vivian Maier (2014), made by John Maloof, a young college dropout who chanced upon a chunk of her stuff in a sale. It was Maloof who diligently established just who this woman was, and smoked out many of her old charges.
He disinterred a conundrum. Maier was a committed and witty self-portraitist who snapped her poker face in windows and mirrors, but the portrait painted by others was less flattering: she could be ornery, abrupt, rude, cold, opinionated. Some charges loved her; others found her cruel. She hated to be touched by men – she once decked one for touching her – and had no interest in titivation, shrouding herself in heavy coats and big hats. The camera slung around her neck was a defensive breastplate.
More than anything, while she blithely invaded the personal space of others to grab their picture, she was obsessively private about her own. Wherever she lived, she would keep her room bolted. If anyone did come in, they would find forests of hoarded junk – she amassed eight tonnes of it – and the spines of her books turned to the wall.
In a new biography, Vivian Maier Developed, Ann Marks sets herself the task of squareing the empathy of the work with the sociopathy of the life. How could they coexist? With truly amazing determination as a genealogical sleuth, Marks ferrets out a childhood in the French Alps, an alcoholic father, a vain and unstable mother, a schizophrenic brother whom Maier barely knew. Like a print emerging from developing fluid in the dark room, a blank past is satisfyingly filled with shapes and shadows.
The story of Maier, more than anything, tells us that you can be a creative genius and earn a living by other means. In her biographer, who worked for 30 years as a corporate executive, Maier has been blessed with an impeccable researcher but not, alas, a tuneful writer.
The prose often demoralises (“the photographs could have disappeared forever via their almost certain dumpster destiny”; “Vivian Maier found her improbable match made in nanny heaven”) and bathos attends her reading of the photographs (“this perfect picture attests to Vivian’s talented eye”). She also extracts insufficient juice from the stack of conversations Maier recorded on cassette, which surely merit better than to be glimpsed as epigraphs.
As for the mystery, Marks works up to a verdict in consultation with a specialist on personality disorders “and several other mental health experts”. Thus Maier is posthumously diagnosed with a hormone imbalance, a hoarding disorder and a schizoid disorder and is assumed to have been sexually abused as a child.
In this telling, Maier’s work went unseen because she was psychologically impeded from letting go of it. “Mystery solved,” concludes the introduction. Marks marks her own homework a little too affirmatively. But the very many photographs – so acute, imaginative and reportorial – speak for themselves, and for the curious woman who took them.
Vivian Maier Developed is published by Simon & Schusterat £28, e-book £19.99. To order your copy call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop