Vivian Maier | ἐκλεκτικός

New York Times — March 27, 2014 — by Manohla Dargis

Finding Vivian Maier

Excerpts below — Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/28/movies/finding-vivian-maier-explores-a-mysterious-photographer.html?rref=movies&_r=0

An exciting electric current of discovery runs through “Finding Vivian Maier,” a documentary about a street photographer who never exhibited her work. She scarcely shared it even with those who knew her. Then again, many of her acquaintances when she was taking some of her remarkable images, particularly in and around Chicago in the 1950s and ’60s, were the children she cared for while working as a nanny. Later in her life, some of those children took care of her in turn, first by moving her into an apartment and then the nursing home where she died in 2009. What rotten timing: She was on the verge of being discovered, first as a curiosity and then as a social-media sensation and a mystery.

It’s no surprise that Maier is now the subject of a documentary, given the quality of her work, the nominal exoticism of her life and the secrets that still drift around her. She’s a terrific story — part Mary Poppins, part Weegee — who was at once emancipated and in service. She was introduced to the world, as it were, by John Maloof, one of this movie’s directors, who bought a box of her negatives at a Chicago auction in 2007 for about $400. The auction house, he explains, told him the work was by Maier, but he found nothing about her on Google. He had purchased the negatives for a book he was working on, but after deciding that they were of no use, he stashed the box away.

…….

The film, which he directed with Charlie Siskel, is absorbing, touching and satisfyingly enjoyable because Maier was a fascinating, poignant and somewhat enigmatic woman. As the title suggests, the filmmakers take up Mr. Maloof’s search for his mystery woman (complete with an unnecessary show-and-tell shot of someone typing her name into Google), framing her as a riddle to be solved. With Mr. Maloof playing M.C. and sleuth, he and Mr. Siskel follow much the same arc that runs through the better news accounts about Maier.

…….

The documentary nods in the direction of some rich issues, including who gets to sanctify work as art, and why. It’s a thread that has additional resonance, given that everyone’s a critic on the Internet, which is where Maier’s work was not just first publicly seen but also anointed. There’s another undercurrent here about her status as an artist (partly because she didn’t formally study art) and even questions about photography’s status as an art (a hoary theme that emerges because she didn’t print all of her own work). Time and professional pronouncements will decide if she was an outsider artist or just an unorthodox one who, as a single 20th-century woman, found freedom, her voice and her own private bohemia while under cover of other people’s bourgeois domesticity.

Correction: March 28, 2014
An earlier version of this review referred incorrectly to Vivian Maier’s use of her negatives. She did in fact print some of her work; it is not the case that she did not print any of it.

ἐκλεκτικός

Steve Wolfgang's view of the world from suburban Chicago — or wherever he may be on any given day

Tag Archives: Vivian Maier

Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Photographer Noticed Even in New York

Share this: