“The North Shore families who hired Vivian Maier as a nanny came to know a kind but eccentric woman who guarded her private life and kept a huge stash of boxes. A chance discovery after her death by a man named John Maloof has spotlighted her secret talent as a photographer and led to a growing appreciation of her vast work.”
From The Life and Work of Street Photographer Vivian Maier by Nora O’ Donnell, Chicago Magazine
In a way it’s almost unfortunate that Vivian Maier’s back-story is so enchanting. An enigmatic heroine and the picturesque rediscovery of lost masterpieces do much to distract attention from where it so rightly belongs – the work itself. Even the most cursory study of it will reveal a unique and multi-faceted vision, perhaps working vaguely in parallel to certain of her contemporaries, but in no way indebted to them. It seems though that not all agree:
“Colin Westerbeck, the former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the country’s leading experts on street photography, thinks Maier is an interesting case. […] “But when you consider the level of street photography happening in Chicago in the fifties and sixties, she doesn’t stand out.” Westerbeck explains that Maier’s work lacks the level of irony and wit of some of her Chicago contemporaries, such as Harry Callahan or Yasuhiro Ishimoto, and unlike them, she herself is often a participant in the shot. The greatest artists, Westerbeck says, know how to create a distance from their subjects.”
Now there's no doubt that addressing any criticism to words quoted in a magazine article is a fool’s errand as things are often taken out of context, or misunderstood, but it seems clear enough that upstarts working in isolation and unrecognised are only welcome in the art world if they are discovered through its own (dubious) machinations and not by a private individual gaining attention and support for this otherwise unseen work on the internet, as opposed to through the efforts of some established cultural institution. Westerbeck’s assessment of the work, despite his reputation as a critic, is frankly unbelievable, obviously confusing style and substance in a way that is most unfortunate.
Bringing these photographs to light is an important, onerous and probably quite expensive task. For what it’s worth it seems to me that John Maloof’s actions have been honourable, at least when he understood the scope of what he had found and we should be grateful for his efforts. Of course questions still need to be answered about how this work was made, how it is being edited – which is perhaps the crucial point I think – and who stands to profit from the control of her archive, but that debate will be severely undermined by facile, premature criticism from people who should really know better. If Maier’s story has anything to teach us it is that photographic history is still mostly a vast, unstable territory, the maps for which must continually be redrawn, and only those with something to lose would claim otherwise
You can read the complete article here and Maloof’s site dedicated to Maier’s work is here.
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