Finding Vivian Maier
'Finding Vivian Maier' is creating quite a stir, with audience and critics alike placing her in the posthumously discovered company of Emily Dickinson, Franz Kafka and Vincent Van Gogh.
Brian Eno said that we're living in the time of the 'artist as curator, a connector of things, a person who scans the enormous field of possible places for artistic attention', and given the explosion of available cultural fragments in the internet age, and the almost incessant abundance of every fragment of culture, past and present, digitised forever, we've gone beyond Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
Director, and inevitable curator himself, Jon Maloof, discovered Maier's work at a 2007 auction. Maier lived for her work, yet it was her most closely guarded secret. Here Maloof acts as a code breaker, assembling her life from her photographic work and in the process aiming to cut through the mystery of why a woman so obviously gifted failed to make any meaningful attempts to show her work to others.
A mystery to all who knew her, Maier's work as a nanny from the 1950s to the 1980s was a practical convenience to allow her to subsist, to travel and to take photographs. She absorbed the world around her but it never absorbed her. As she says, she was a kind of spy. Through her photographs we enter into a kind of anthropological study of post-war American life including the lives of those she cared for.
One thing each of the families she worked for share in common is their perception of Maier as a distant, unknowable person. Although they each had slightly different stories to tell and provided different fragments of her personality, they each came to the same conclusion: Maier with her a faux-French accent, gave different names to different people, rewrote her early history, stood apart from others, viewed human experience at a distance, yet her distance from others allowed her to capture the reality of everything around her as voyeur.
The images she made display a warmth and humour as well as a sorrow and reveal her interest in morbid stories of human suffering. She captured the very essence of the culture, from the high to the impoverished lows yet during her lifetime nobody knew this. Her work blends dashes of Henri Cartier-Bresson, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank and some of her very best images are as good as anything those established artists produced.
Stealing intense and personal images of those she encountered, often without their knowledge, while remaining to those she photographed and those acquainted with her hidden from view, Maier's photographs are a revelation and a leave you wondering how many unknown artists must be working today under the shadows of their own anonymous lives.
Beneath the visage, photography became the one true place where she could express herself, not through meaningful contact with others, but by watching them and questioning them. She wanted to understand the world, perhaps before she allowed the world to understand her, or by collecting fragments of the world around her she might make sense of her own role in it. What we discover is that this mere act itself was her life, she lived to watch others live.
Ultimately we are left with the enigma, yet we come to understand this was someone immensely proud and confident of their craft, but who was never able to fulfil what was most certainly a desire to have her work seen by others. Maier was most herself when observing others from behind a lens. Without it she would remain anonymous and invisible, her life's work hidden and her mystery intact, until Jon Maloof came along.
