Vivian

by Christina Hesselholdt

  Now then.

  It was the good Eugénie who found the guardian, maybe she used her connections on the Gold Coast, Long Island. Her name is Emilie Haugmard.

  Viv

  Emilie says we are wiping the slate clean. And no sooner has she said that than first Grandma dies and then Nana, within less than a year. The building that is my life breaks in two, and what about me, I become a very small child in the arms of Emilie, where she lets me drown. When I am lively and on my feet again I buy a Brownie using Nana’s inheritance. And a subscription to Popular Photography. (A young black man rode a bony horse under the elevated railway).

  Narrator

  Carl and Viv receive their money all at once, but Maria receives hers in small installments – Eugénie knew how things would turn out otherwise.

  Viv

  I have returned to the scene of death, to dead Aunt Maria Florentine. Once I thought that loneliness meant that I could be allowed to be left in peace, now I know that it means that there is hardly anybody remaining who knows even a tiny bit about me.

  Narrator

  When the will is read after Aunt Maria Florentine’s death, it turns out that Viv is the sole heir to Beauregard. That makes her mother angry and envious for all eternity.

  Viv has gone to Champsaur to sell Beauregard. And to move her aunt’s body from a communal grave to a burial plot she has bought in Saint-Julien and supplied with a stone. She doesn’t want to live in Champsaur, she wants money to travel with, she wants to take photographs around the world, just like Henri Cartier-Bresson. She sells the farm to the neighbour and gets a decent portion of money from it.

  This restless family. Like ants. They scurry across the Atlantic over and over again or from state to state in America, one of them stays, the other one runs off, and next time it’s the reverse. I sit (myself to death) in my bed and watch these wild globetrotters (run themselves to death).

  Viv

  The baker asked: ‘Why do you take so many pictures?’ ‘Have you counted them?’ I replied. He had nothing more to say.

  A tiny little selection of my masterpieces from Champsaur:

  A black hen tall as a tower, narrow at the top and wide at the bottom, with her chicks, a majestical proud motherguard, peering across the alley, ready to unfurl her wings and sweep up the chicks

  Aunt’s new grave (I bought the largest stone I could get) with the chalky-white gravestone with the cross shining in competition with the snow-covered Moutet

  Sheep (oh-so elastic) behind the shepherd

  A trinity of pigs, head by head

  Beauregard, a microworld, the high stone walls, a farmhand, a horse unhitched or not yet hitched, the wagon shafts resting on the ground, the carriage practically tipped over, without a horse as it is

  Monsieur Paramour, with a wine-dissipated nature, but he clearly remembered how I bit his hand back then in the stable. He is shameless, with his purple face and open fly

  Grand-père

  Good day, Monsieur Baille, because I’m certainly not going to say Grand-père, to start with may I be permitted to take your photograph in front of the old barn, thank you for meeting me, Sir, thank you, thank you very much.

  We drank red wine with water (for my part little more than coloured water, all the same it tasted acidic) and ate dry bread and a couple of squares of dark chocolate sitting under a tree in the garden, neither of us were fond of talking about ourselves, so we talked about New York City, I tried to ask him what impact the skyscrapers have had on him, whether he thought by any means that they had been able to compensate for the mountains, but his lungs had been devastated by cordite at a munition works, he kept trying to say that word but he could not stop coughing. I also asked about his work at Beauregard, but it was a perilous topic. He emerged from his coughing with a terrified gasp, so I asked whether he would tell me a little about his childhood. Then he showed me on the tabletop, using his fingers as soldiers, he marched the two enemy armies towards each other, and one of them conquered the other, but a single surviving soldier rose from the slain, turned tail and ran as far across the tabletop as his shoulder joint permitted. (It was you, Monsieur Baille, as a youngster, I thought, where the tabletop was not a battlefield, but the Atlantic that you fled across).

  Finally I asked him if he wanted to come and see the new stone at Aunt Maria Florentine’s grave, that was if he hadn’t already seen it? He could ride on the back of the moped, he wouldn’t take up much space, but he didn’t feel his health would permit it, well then au revoir Monsieur Baille, Nicolas, mon cher grand-père, the sinner of Beauregard, the seducer, now a wizened old man who sits coughing out his soul beneath a tree.

  Narrator

  I remember how eight-year-old Vivianne would not say au revoir to people she knew she would never see again, it contradicted her desire for truth.

  Viv

  I had the technician at the photo lab make the best ones into postcards, we get on well with each other.

  I have captured all that this landscape is, the mountains that supply it with an air of staging, it is due to its immovability, and then the snow that can cleanse your gaze (here I happen to recall one day I was at work with Nana, in one of her kitchens, and she served me everything they got upstairs, as the courses came out, and between each course she gave me champagne sorbet as a pallet cleanser). I have finished documenting everyone in the village (some with more than one picture).

  I aim to ascend Moutet, but my friends from school, of whom a good many are now grown-up married men and women, several with more than one child, are concerned that I – ‘a young woman’ – ramble alone around in the mountains, and in order to set them at ease I told them that I’m armed. I laugh all the way to the summit.

  Narrator

  Of the enormous number of photographs, negatives, rolls of undeveloped film that were found, partly after a large part of Vivian’s belongings went to auction in 2007 and partly after her death, and of which roughly two thirds (at the time of writing, as they say) have been viewed, only three photographs of her mother have been found from one day in 1951 at the beach in Southampton on Long Island, but it may well be that the final third conceals countless pictures of her… this is a curious task I’m in the midst of… the material that inspires my story is in constant development… I feel like a dog that has its nose right up to the rear end of Time, and it’s a little cramped up there… so I draw my nose back. And plant both feet in my story. Then I contend that these kinds of things took place.

  Viv

  My mother’s affliction is that she cannot forget. Over and over again she returns to every single calamity, every single injustice she has been met with in her life, and each time with anger and sorrow; the one who has done her the most harm is obviously Father: he is the Great Beast in the Book of Revelation, I am the product of a rape (she tells me that today like she has brought me a gift on our excursion), she wanted to leave him, but he would not let her go: he knocked her down, and out I came, ‘I am really sorry to hear that,’ I say and go down to the water’s edge, but she follows me, because it is just one of countless miseries that were inflicted upon her. The sun is shining, can’t you just hold your tongue, I think. We’ve been for a swim, the food has been eaten. I used to feel sorry for her. I used to want to atone for all that harm by being Good, by continuing to return to her. And admittedly: for a long time, I could not let go. I hung on to her, the worse she felt, the better I held on. There is only one way to make her hold her tongue, and that is by giving her undivided attention, so I say: ‘Mother, Mother, let me get a picture of you in your new outfit!’ We had packed our things and were about to leave, but now she puts them down and poses in front of the sea, when I take a proper look at her, the affection comes pouring in, and along with all the light-blue and yellow (the reeds) it is just far too much, I feel like throwing myself down and shouting to Life, ‘I surrender, your terms are too stringent!’ And so I instruct her to take off the cap.

  I wait until the sa
ilboat behind her is in line with her upper arm – and now she is standing with the cap she has folded into a triangle. How her stomach bulges, my old mother whose life has passed. Now she looks sly and callous.

  Then it occurs to me that we could visit the Shinnecock Reservation together, I’ve been there myself once before, then she can see people who have had more harm done to them and have lost even more than her, their land, their livelihood, their sacred grounds, their future prospects; at night the girls prostitute themselves: white colonizer raping Native American. I regret it as soon as I have suggested it, because she could get it into her head to ask them to dress up in their plumage. But she’s not listening at all, now it’s about money, and then suddenly she lights up because she has got it into her head that we could find the property where The Great Gatsby was filmed, she pushes me and addresses me as ‘old sport’ like Jay Gatsby always does with Nick Carraway.

  ‘Mother, that’s way too far from here,’ I say, and then she continues in the same vein, she wants my money, I had promised her my money, she says. No, I say, I’ve never said that (but I am uncertain, maybe I’ve once promised it to her, to get some peace). Beauregard was her childhood home, why did I inherit Beauregard?

  Carl is simply lost.

  A daughter’s a daughter all her life, but I too want out of here, I refuse to love her any more, and in order for it to be fair I also refuse to love Father any more – go away affection, go away attachment, go away memories.

  It is an immense relief, when I walk through the gate to the family home where I work, that it isn’t my family, but that I can get a little family life, test the hot porridge at the very edge without burning myself.

  Maria

  She is alone. I am alone. She could have come along to see a film; when she declined, I thought that she would end up having second thoughts. I know she prefers going to the cinema alone, she has told me that to a greater extent she then feels like a part of what she sees; she finds it distracting to have someone she knows sitting in the seat next to her, it reminds her that she does not belong on the screen but on the cinema seat and has to go back out in her own life, oh don’t finish, don’t finish, that’s the kind of thing I could be thinking about the film. But she could have made an exception, just for today.

  Narrator

  There’s a photograph that Viv took of Jeanne at Materne Studio in 1953, where she is looking at a selection of Vivian’s masterpieces of Champsaur, well, strictly speaking you can’t honestly see what the gentle-looking person with the combed-back white hair is looking at, only that they are negatives. She has adjusted her expression in the way that everybody who knows they’re being photographed adjusts their expression, all the desolation that rushes across someone who knows they’re alone or believe themselves to be unseen, is consigned to regions deep within the forehead.

  Jeanne

  Voilà, here you have my public face, and at this moment I am a celebrity, at any rate I once made the headlines, including some I could have done without, Insane Again, a pioneer within her field who concentrates on looking at her young friend’s works. In a moment I’m going to say something about these works, which really are quite exceptional. This will become an accessible representation of me that someone one day (maybe) will look at, and it will be clear that it’s me because I was in all modesty if not famous then at least well-known. Now I know what I’m going to say in a moment about these pictures of the people from Champsaur, the shepherds, the farmers, the small cowled creature who looks like the bellringer of Notre Dame, I’m going to say that the names of these people ought to be written under the photographs, because without names they become representatives of the shepherd profession, the farmer profession, the rural proletariat in the French Alps in the ’50s whereas, ‘Vivian, that photo you’ve just taken introduces me, Jeanne Bertrand, to the world.’

  Narrator

  Jeanne looks at the landscapes she knows so well and which she knows she is never going to see again: pangs or entire waves of melancholy and longing, and the places drag the long since deceased parents, grandparents along with them – her mother, her father, the whole wretched business of abandoning the homeland in the belief they would be raking in the gold in America, contrary to all the warnings the letters from America had contained stating that things were not like that. Her father thought they wrote that in order to keep him and others away so there was more (gold) for themselves.

  Or maybe she feels nothing. Maybe the thought strikes her (why just now?) that the mental illness, the insanity, whatever we’re going to call it, was something she crawled into in order to get some peace from the sorrow of others, so she pictures a person sitting down in a corner with a blanket over the head.

  Jeanne

  There really are a lot of sheep. The shepherds with kids in their arms, three rabbits on a balcony tied together with rope around the neck, they have placed their front paws on the edge of the balcony to get a better look (with the look of aggrieved theatregoers), soon they’ll end up in the pot. ‘You’re good at animals, Vivian,’ which sounded condescending but wasn’t intended that way. And here are the Alpine children in a row with trekking poles and knee breeches, a boy who is practically all head and unease. Animals and children, you can do with them as you please, move about, lock up, hit, abuse, destroy, eat or abandon.

  Should we talk about composition and responsibility? ‘To photograph is to focus, and to focus is to exclude.’

  Viv nods (and an expression I remember from her mother crosses her face, it is a mixture of impatience and derisiveness, like when Maria poked a finger in my side and teased me about my Sensitivity). Because she knows, she knows, what have I got to contribute? Then I ask about Carl, but she has no idea where he is. Now Clara enters, and Viv takes a picture of her standing by the old photographic apparatus that we have to manoeuvre down into the cellar. I thought that Carl could have helped.

  ‘Vivian, some day someone will say: That’s Clara Materne, founder of Materne Studio,’ then Viv laughs and utters her usual ah-bah-oui, I don’t think I need to be so concerned any longer.

  Narrator

  In 1959, Vivian Maier travelled round the world and photographed (using her inheritance, the sale of Beauregard, or that money she might have long since spent on cameras, so maybe she was able to afford the journey by putting money aside from her work as a nanny). From her photographs it is evident that in Hong Kong there are Chinese people, in Cairo Egyptians, in India Indians and so on.

  The camera made it easier to travel alone, it was really like having someone accompany you. It gave her a project, a purpose.

  Stopping in front of people and staring at them wasn’t awkward because there was a purpose to it: taking pictures. Nor was it awkward to sit down to dinner, alone, at a restaurant, when the camera was on the tablecloth, next to her, because she could reach for it at any moment.

  I wonder if it has a certain soothing effect through the viewfinder to see framed squares of the world?

  Viv

  It was the great photography exhibition The Family of Man at MOMA in ’55 with photographs of people from all over the world that made me set off, off to see people, off to see places; the preface to the catalogue stated that photography explains man to man. I didn’t understand. Is it an explanation that, all over the world, you can see children being born, weddings being held, water being drunk? Mankind as one big family. Is that not a little sentimental, ten years after the Bomb? Is the intention an attempt to avert worse atrocities to the great family in the future? It is obviously extremely commendable.

  Don’t get me wrong, the photographs are marvellous, it’s the preface and the sentimentality of the project that make me hesitant. (I might not have seen it if Susan Sontag hadn’t pointed it out in On Photography, writing that The Family of Man denies the determining weight of history, calling it sentimental humanism).

  Narrator

  At the time, she had already spent three years as a nanny in Chicago with a
family of three boys. And before that she had worked as a housemaid in Southhampton on Long Island and various places in New York City. Witness accounts from the many families she worked for are very similar, so I decided to only tell of (and that is to invent) her stay with one of them, namely the Rices (a name made up by me) in Wilmette, Chicago, otherwise there would presumably be a lot of repetition, and nobody enjoys that. I could have chosen the family with the three boys from Highland Park, Chicago, where she stayed for the longest time, and who kept a bit of an eye on her for the rest of her life and helped her when she got old, found her an apartment, sat at her deathbed and scattered her ashes at one of her favourite places, in a wood somewhere with wild strawberries. But to tell the truth, it seemed overwhelming to me to have to manage three children, so that’s why I chose a family with just one, being an only child myself I stuck to a structure I know, there are already enough characters to make several soups here.