You’d have to be a Touareg
tribesperson or deep sea-dwelling creature not to have been alerted to the
Vivian Maier phenomenon in the last year or so. The nanny who took at least one
Rolleiflex film roll of pictures a day for 30 years and never once exhibited a
shot has become big business since the ‘discovery’ of her work by several men
from Chicago around 2007 when her vast horde of personal possessions, mainly
kept in locked storage, became available for auction. The tens of thousands of
negatives which detail her compulsive recording of street scenes - not just
from New York and Chicago but also around the globe – now form the basis of a
canon of work that is being acclaimed as a lost photographic treasure. Finding Vivian Maier is the second of two documentaries made in the last 18
months to examine both the pictures and, more importantly to those selling you
the films, the mysterious back-story that comes attached. It’s a very good film
indeed, but what does it tell us about the way in which we create mythology
around ‘artists’? About the reasons we take photography? About the nature of
art, itself? A lot, as it turns out…
Actually, Finding Vivian Maier most eminently
tells us most about the untrustworthy nature of eyewitnesses. Obviously every documentary is fraught with the
danger of unreliable narrative, whether it’s in the interviewees’ tales or in
the post-production and editing. Within about three minutes Finding
Vivian Maier throws up an obvious challenge to credibility by both
placing the film’s co-director (and owner of the vast bulk of Maier’s legacy),
John Maloof, as central narrator and then by showing us a fabricated sequence
to demonstrate him bidding for the legendary boxes of negatives in the auction
house (in the BBC’s marginally earlier documentary it’s revealed that Maloof
actually won the lot with an ‘absentee bid’ and therefore wasn’t even there at the sale). So hackles are
immediately up for anyone who labours under the misapprehension that a documentary
tells a tale objectively. For me, the initial resistance was also aided by the
fact that Maloof comes across as humourless as well as bearing an uncanny
resemblance to a grown-up Phineas Flynn from Phineas and Ferb, but that’s neither here nor
there. After the first half an hour Maloof (and fellow director, Charlie Siske)
have mostly edged themselves out of the narrative and let the plethora of
first-hand accounts of Maier, her eccentricities and work take centre stage.
In doing so Maloof teases out a compelling account; not
necessarily of Maier’s own life, but of the lives of the middle classes who
gave her a home and allowed her to record their lives alongside her own darker
record of street life in America’s major metropolises. Her earliest position
work as a nanny - for the Ginsberg family and their three sons – draws the
fondest recollections. This was where the obsessively private Vivian came closest
to forming permanent bonds with both parents and children and her shots of
their leafy lives in the suburbs are a glowing testament to a USA in the midst
of its most optimistic period, just before the fall. Contrasted with her later charges – when not only her own
circumstances were reduced, but also following the catastrophic events of the
late ‘60s onwards – she emerges as self-possessed, politically engaged and as
someone who was actually very good with children.
Again and again commentators are wheeled on to contradict
each other. Especially hilarious is the pompous academic who states with
absolute certainty that her French accent was fake (her mother was French and
she actually lived in France between the ages of six and 12) – even challenging
Maloof to read his dissertation on the pronunciation of French vowels (no,
really).
But it’s here that any discussion about Maier becomes
problematic. For Vivian’s tale is that of a non-artist, made an artist posthumously: a woman who deliberately
coveted her own anonymity during her own lifetime and who, as various people state,
would have probably hated any whiff of fame or validation. As one letter reveals,
she knew she was a gifted
photographer, even in her early days, but she never actively sought the
recognition which supposedly drives ‘true’ artists in their lifetimes. So is
the ‘Maier industry’ (as Alan Yentob calls it in the BBC’s film of her life) a
bogus one? Maloof’s answer is to paint himself a loner who battled the art
establishment who resisted her acceptance into the history books. It’s the
film’s biggest failing, simply because it perpetuates the age-old fascination
with creative people who were ‘cruelly’ ignored by their contemporaries.
The idea of a photographer who deigns to share his or her
work is doubly ironic in the 21st century, of course. In an age
where we clamour for attention, and share everything while beset by
dilettantism on every side (even in this blog), the tale of a woman who not
only shrouded herself in mystery – even to the point of lying about her origins
and regularly changing the spelling of her name – but also seemed blissfully
unaware that her exceptional talent could have perhaps paved the way for a
career seems so, well… romantic.
Again and again we’re asked ‘so who was this woman?’ up to the point where I
felt I knew more about her than I’d ever known about, say, Diane Arbus or
Lisette Model, both of who’s work Maier had
to know of.
And while the story of her life was filled with enough dark
family secrets and deliberate obfustication to make it utterly compelling, you
sensed that such rooting around would have appalled Maier herself. All the
muttering about ‘a dark side’ and the fact that she hated to talk about herself
just back up Joel Meyerowitz’s claims that to be a competent street
photographer these qualities are not just desirable, but essential. In short: Vivian
Maier knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Meyerowitz comes across
as about the only reliable observer of her work and is the only commonality
between the two documentaries made about Vivian. As a photographer he explains
the skill and the tenacity it took to get such intimate glimpses of American
life. He’s also the only one to question the validity of the editorial choices that
go into prints made from negatives never even seen by Maier in her lifetime.
With these facts in mind, I’d argue that the Maier
phenomenon is rooted in several wrong-headed notions about art and photography.
A lot of what fascinates us with Maier’s work isn’t the startlingly brilliant
compositional skills or in the recent trend in clinging to and
lionising historicity as some part of tendency to hanker after all things
‘vintage’ (I say recent, but this is a quality in modern post-industrial
society that’s been around since before Constable painted his mythical Haywain). You could regard this as
ironic as Vivian herself wore what her peers regarded as strangely fusty,
old-fashioned clothes: primarily, I suspect, to put her subjects at ease as well as repelling any unwanted male attention. Next
is the suspect quality of the bandwagon-jumping which leads to her work now
selling for between two and eight thousand dollars apiece. Such instant
desirability (painfully highlighted by the late appearance of Tim Roth at a
swanky gallery opening where he patronisingly explains why he bought a picture
of a hobo, because there’s some ‘joy’ beneath the destitute misery of the
subject) is nothing more than the twitchings of an over-privileged few,
desperate to be arbiters of taste. But you do sense that Maloof is self-aware
enough to realise that in many ways he’s lucked out and not above blame. As
fellow owner, Jeff Goldstein, explains about their role in the story in the
BBC’s film: ‘we’re mostly just trying not to be public assholes’. Luckily, in
Maloof’s film, he’s canny enough to retreat from the fray and let the various
factions strut their stuff, leaving us with a film that succeeds because it
raises more questions than it answers.
The finest example of this is the way in which you emerge
with a far more balanced view of Vivian than the people she actually knew, and
this all depends on the period in which she was encountered. In later years, if you are to believe the families’ accounts,
she was batty, belligerent and borderline abusive. But taken against the
obvious issues displayed by the more self-obsessed and tricky children of the
‘70s (and parents, especially in the case of the last family she worked for),
one comes away with a feeling that this was a woman who had spent a life only
in the service of others so that she could pursue her true calling: the
recording of life around her with an exceptional eye, a sense of humour and a
deep understanding of the precarious nature of life. It’s no wonder that, as
she grew older, her status as a permanent outsider, combined with the fact that
the families she worked for became less well-balanced, finally ground her down.
This is reflected in the fact that she allowed the Ginsbergs to call her ‘Viv’ whereas
the bratty later charges were only allowed ‘Miss Maiers’ (note the added ‘s’). I
would imagine that by the late ‘70s she knew that she would die alone and in
relative poverty, but this was a price she was willing to pay in the service of
a greater muse.
In comparison Alan Yentob’s Imagine series BBC doc - Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures - is predictably woeful.
As with all of this criminally vanity project-like series, it’s redolent with
the diminutive, inflated ego of Yentob although, to be fair, he’s far less
prominent than usual. But one
senses that it’s he who pushes the first half’s obsession with the bargain-hunter
aspect of the ‘Maier industry’. Like a miniature, even more egomaniacal, David
Dickinson he keeps probing the owners of Vivian’s legacy (here represented by
Ron Slattery and Jeff Goldstein: Maloof was making his own film simultaneously)
as to how much money they paid for (and subsequently made on) the pictures and
boxes of ephemera. Luckily, just as it really seems as though Yentob is presenting
us with a bourgeois version of Storage Hunters, the film finally
gets around to giving us some interesting facts which, when tallied with
Maloof’s (far better) film make for interesting contrast.
Yet, if there’s one aspect that the BBC version of events
excels in, it’s the chronology and background to Vivian’s self-education in
photography. You get no sense from Maloof that Vivian ever paid attention to
other photographers whereas she not only lived with another female photographer
in her early years, but she was known to have studied the masters. And Maloof’s
slant of anti-academia is belied by the fact that he was allegedly alerted to
the worth of the treasure trove he unearthed by a ‘Californian Art Professor’,
according to Ron Slattery, as well as the appearance of at least two
heavyweight ‘Maier scholars’.
However as an earlier (and visibly rushed) work it mostly
fails. Falling even more
egregiously into the trap of ‘background story’ it ends up feeling not unlike a
Catherine Cookson novel; full of illegitimate children and disgraced
chambermaids. What it fails to mention is that just about every family under
the sun has such skeletons clogging up their closet; especially in the turmoil
of the early 20th century. One ends up confused as to whether this
is a soap opera-cum-detective tale or a film about the arts – something which has beset so many
recent documentaries (cf: Looking for Sugarman another film
which obsesses over the romantic myth of the undiscovered genius).
But if you watch both films back-to-back (as I did) you’ll
come away with at least a sense that Vivian Maier was neither more eccentric or
strange than the majority of us, and that it’s probably far too soon to be
heaping her with plaudits or superlatives. One look at her work speaks far more
eloquently than any film could, and that’s not only what she would have
undoubtedly wanted, but also what she undoubtedly deserves.
