When I saw the above photograph, my first thought was: thank goodness styles have changed, or that I was born in 1958 instead of 1938, because otherwise the fellow farthest left with the bird legs could have been me. The picture was taken by Vivian Maier. Until yesterday, I'd never heard of her. That's not particularly surprising. When she died at 83 in 2009, hardly anyone had heard of her. A couple years earlier, she had stopped making payments on a storage unit she'd rented in Chicago. The contents, which included tens of thousands of photographic negatives and prints, were sold at auction to three different collectors. One of them, John Maloof, was interested mainly in Chicago neighborhoods, and here were all these photographs of Chicago street scenes. Eventually, though, he got interested enough in the photographer to google her name. The exercise turned up the obituary of a Vivian Maier who for 40 years had worked as a nanny in Chicagoland. Could this be the woman whose photographs he had? Yes. He tracked down some of her former charges and summarized their description of her:
She was a socialist, a feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. . . . She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone.
That's from the Wikipedia article about her. She might not have shown the pictures to anyone, but Maloof posted a selection of them to Flickr, where they attracted lots of attention, including from art critics. Before long, the photographs Vivian Maier took on her days off from caring for other people's children were the subject of exhibitions around the world. She's now pretty widely regarded as one of the leading American photographers of the 20th century.
You never know what's going to happen to you, even after you're dead. Maier made a fair number of "self-portraits"—they often showed only her shadow. Maloof ended up making (with Charlie Siskel) a film about her, Finding Vivian Maier. It was nominated for the Best Documentary Oscar in 2015. You can view hundreds of Maier's photographs here.
Comments