Vivian Maier

“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.

(via)

Margaret M. de Lange - Daughters

 
While the narratives of childhood have a familiar sentimentality, there are still other possibilities available to us, showing instead the more complex state of what is lived, if being perhaps no more “true” in any sense. Take for example the uncanny, often disturbing scenes to be found in the work of Margret M. de Lange, addressed more directly to a psychological space than the worldly, and where even moments of wonder have their dark edges, a kind of prescience. If she captures those deep reveries of childhood (and I think she does) her pictures themselves are more profoundly informed by the tension of comparing these seemingly charmed moments of being to the very adult realisation of lost innocence. But to be born takes a long time and has an erratic trajectory; de Lange clearly understands her daughters are near feral beings, or are still not quite of the human mould. Their vulnerability is of an altogether different sort and if we have forgotten this other time, then the pictures cannot entirely (or even in part) return that to us, though we can get a distant sense of it – calling up some phantom memory, a sympathetic glance at abandon, which we no longer have access to and that might, on closer inspection, be something we find only by wanting to see it.

The rest of this project can be found here.

Punctured

This is a near hypnotic video piece by artist William E. Jones made using "killed" negatives from the Farm Security Administration archives, he has also published a book using the same material in a very effective way. You can read more about this project here.

(via)

The Genius of Photography

This portentously titled six-part series was first broadcast in 2007 and watching it again online I was struck by the same irritation that I felt the first time around. Let’s get one thing straight – photography has no history, at least not as it is conceived of here, a narrative suspiciously akin to the one that was invented for the Museum of Modern Art by John Szarkowski. You might say of course that expecting a television documentary to cover the infinitely complex development of a whole medium is asking a bit too much, but the producers have taken every occasion to frame it that way and numerous establishment figures line up in support. We can plainly see how easy it is for received wisdom – downright cliché in this case – to become an orthodox value, the idea being that photography itself possesses some kind of native “genius” that is manifested in pictures. Now that may well be the case (and I think, to an extent, it actually is), but an explicitly modernist notion of progress built in to the story means that whole sections of the medium’s past are only allowed to function in terms of how we arrived at the kind of practice understood to be “essentially” photographic. Such an approach creates a false hierarchy that gives undue privilege to certain aspects of photography at the expense of other – equally valid – ways of thinking about what it can do. See for example the near disastrous contribution from Peter Galassi, who dismisses the early pictorialist photographers – with just the proper hint of masculine disdain – as “self-appointed elites” who tried to pervert the course of “real” photography with their artistic indulgences. Of course, this is the version of photographic history most suited to the format of the programs and in a sense it is understandably weighted towards those that best fit its agenda. Even so, there are some puzzling omissions; where, for example, are photographers of such considerable influence as Anders Petersen, or Daido Moriyama? For all that the series is still quite enjoyable and even a worthwhile guide to some (if only some) of the key issues. There remains the pleasure of watching photographers at work – Nan Goldin is a treat, as is the touching conversation between Larry Sultan and his father. But why this particularly flawed narrative is still so often favoured in a wider context is hard to fathom, or indeed justify.

The Genius of Photography now has its own YouTube channel so you can view the whole thing and make up your own mind.

Marcus Erixson

In those long, long hours between waking and sleep the appearance of everything around you begins to change, taking on a sinister cast; dreams bleed out into the world, they spill across the dark streets, the half-empty beds. It seems like it’s always that time in Marcus Erixson’s photographs, the night life, when there are shadows everywhere, most of them your own. Pulling together those moments of fragmented reflection, solitudes that traffic in cigarettes and wolfish chatter, reading some kind of prophecy in the cracked pavement or the curve of a hip, Erixson is working back into the light, which might at first seem like the dawn, but then again, maybe it’s just another bar... There is a certain kind of energy driving these pictures that can easily burn up whatever it touches and that sense of risk is one of the qualities that validate them. The work depends on an implied presence, the drama of this transient self finding a mirror (however distorted it might be) in the world around him for the turmoil, the rapture and the despair of which we are so fleetingly composed. He will not always succeed, of course, and in a sense that is almost beside the point, because what matters is the kind of authenticity he can bring to the search.

Erixson's website is here. There is also a comprehensive selection of his work on Lens Culture.