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.
