Vivian Maier

by Colin Westerbeck

  Such images begin to seem a kind of oblique pornography, related to the more explicitly pornographic subject matter Maier was also photographing. Her fascination with naked female bodies lay somewhere between mere curiosity and obsession. She photographed the marquees of pornographic movie theaters and the reproductions of naked women in pornographic magazines that she found in trash cans. Her attraction to this subject matter may suggest that she was a lesbian, as do the masculine clothes—from her hats to her shoes—she favored. If so, she seems to have kept her sexuality hidden from others, and possibly herself. Hints of it came out only in the one universal language she possessed: her photography.

  Maier worked in a variety of genres, from portraiture to architecture to landscape. A picture from 1978 (see here) that shows architecture’s place in the landscape exemplifies how her intuitive genius for her medium led her to an understanding of issues then being explored in theoretical writings on photography—which she was almost certainly not reading. This view of a grand white house with its roof and front yard covered in snow has what the late critic and philosopher Roland Barthes called a punctum: the single errant detail in certain photographs that gives them their power. In this case, the punctum is the one spot of warm, yellow lamplight seen beneath the overhang of the front porch in an otherwise blue, cheerless scene. Maier photographed this house from other points of view in other seasons, which suggests it may have been the home of the family she was working for at the time.

  Location unknown, 1988.

  Chicago, July 1975.

  Allan Sekula, another key commentator on photography, in a sense bridged the gap between Maier and Barthes. A contemporary of both, Sekula was a brilliant photographer as well as one of the most trenchant writers on the medium. When he saw for sale on eBay individual photographs by Maier that John Maloof had acquired at auction, he intervened to inform Maloof that she was a historically important figure whose work should be kept together. When writer Richard Cahan later asked Sekula to expand on his view of Maier’s significance, Sekula characterized her as a photographer who “had an open and inclusive and very fundamental idea of what constituted ‘America’ that was missed by a lot of photographers in the 1950s and ’60s.” Moreover, Sekula argued, “This may have had to do with her view being that of an outsider, a foreigner. I find myself imagining her as a female Robert Frank, penniless, without a Guggenheim grant, unknown and working as a nanny to get by.”

  Sekula’s characterization of Maier is, for him, uncharacteristically melodramatic. Yet she and Frank, known best for his photography collection The Americans, do invite comparison in certain ways. He grew up and received his original training as a photographer in Switzerland, just across the border from the Champsaur valley in France, where Maier spent part of her childhood and where she later made her first photographs. Born only two years before her, Frank was of the same generation. More significantly, he, too, had an acute sensitivity to the place—or rather, the displacement—of African Americans in society.

  A color slide Maier made early in her career as a photographer is as poignant an observation of African Americans as any of Frank’s studies (see here). On the curb across the street, waiting in rank formation for the light to change, is a group of white businessmen, while right in front of us, out on the edges of the frame and out of focus, are two young African American women. The blurry, marginalized place these women have in the photograph is an acute commentary on the place black people have had in American society. Other photographs Maier made over the years elaborate on the judgment made in that 1959 image, too (see below and here). Black and white people face away from each other with grim expressions, in photographs where it is sometimes the African American who is shrouded in shadow, sometimes the white person. Either way, the lighting is emblematic of race relations in America at the time.

  Intermixed with this dark view of American society are more hopeful images of African Americans that Maier took in the late 1970s and early 1980s. She sees that even in a city with a history of racism as ingrained as Chicago’s, African Americans have gradually begun to occupy a new position not just in the city’s economy but also in its politics (see here). The poster image the elegantly dressed young woman carries is of Chicago’s first African American mayor, Harold Washington. Judging by the date of Maier’s photograph, her subject has just come from the memorial service held for Mayor Washington after he tragically died in office.

  Chicago, March 1980.

  Frank’s book The Americans had a defining impact on photography, including that by Winogrand, Arbus, and Friedlander shown in Szarkowski’s 1967 exhibition at MoMA. Like the photography in that exhibition, all Frank’s photographs for his book were gelatin-silver prints—that is, black-and-white photography. His view of America in the 1950s is monochromatic, shot on overcast days. The contrast between color and black-and-white is indicative of the difference between his sensibility and Maier’s. Despite being roughly his age, she continued to photograph African Americans in later decades and in color, thereby creating a more inclusive view of American society. She was as much an outsider as Frank was when she started, but photographing over a longer span of history, she used color to create a more inclusively ambiguous—or maybe just two-minded—view of American society. This is the side of her work Sekula didn’t appreciate when he compared her exclusively to Frank.

  Maier was a self-invented polymath of a photographer who sometimes seems to have been working in one genre and at other times in a contrary one. That said, in both its essence and its complexity, her career—her essential genre—was street photography. She wasn’t the sort of street photographer who could always count on her own invisibility when standing in front of a subject she was photographing. She relied more on making the subjects she offered to photograph feel flattered by her attention to them, even when her real interest in taking the picture was something she found odd about them, like the clashing patterns of the coats they were wearing (see here). Thus could a posed portrait turn into the classic visual “gotcha” characteristic of street photography.

  Chicago, November 1978.

  Because her visibility when face-to-face with subjects limited the sort of photograph she could make, she developed the ability to make a revealing picture even, or perhaps especially, when her subjects were turned away from her. If she had a favorite subject she liked to sneak up on from behind, it was hairdos (see here). Another subject indicative of the comic mischief Maier could get up to in photographs made behind the subject’s back is one of a workman rummaging in the back of a van so cluttered it creates the illusion he may have skewered himself on the business end of the long screwdriver that has poked a hole in his hip pocket (see here). It’s a sight gag. That screwdriver seems to exemplify literally what Barthes meant by the term punctum.

  As entertaining as such photographs may be, Maier also had an eye for more evocative, ambiguous subjects, like the image above. On the one hand, there’s something comical about the way the woman seems about to impale herself on the fire hydrant. On the other hand, the image is soulful: an elderly woman is burdened by the shopping bags she carries and her need to rest for a moment. The lighting gives this photograph, made at dusk, its predominantly melancholy mood. Other photographs like this one from the late 1970s convey a similar feeling, of subjects weighed down with a symbolic poignancy, which was an emotion Maier herself was experiencing by then.

  Yet another aspect of this photograph that gives it its power is the fact that in both shape and color, the woman and the fire hydrant match each other. It’s an amusing coincidence at first, but the more you look at the image, the more resonant it becomes. Though such pictures are most prominent in Maier’s late work of the 1970s and 1980s, earlier examples crop up, as well. In the following picture from 1966, for example, a young woman stares into a trash can. Her posture—her attitude, as revealed in the way she addresses the trash can—mimics the can’s battered shape, as she crosses her legs and bows her head. She and
the trash can are performing a little pas de deux. This sort of formalism, through which the shapes in a photograph coincide or interlock to enrich the image’s power, is a quality of certain works by Maier that break free of the aesthetic that predominates in an Arbus or Frank image.

  Location unknown, June 1966.

  This tendency shows how independent Maier was of whatever canons of photography history she may have read about, including what was politically correct in the polemics of aesthetics in postwar America. Her answer to all that might have been, to quote Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself”: “Do I contradict myself? / Very well then I contradict myself, / (I am large, I contain multitudes.)” The one advantage Maier gained from keeping her photography to herself was an exemption from contradiction and condescension. She didn’t have to worry about either the orthodoxy or the approval of her peers. Perhaps when she was rummaging through trash cans, as she often did, looking for discarded magazines and newspapers, she was on a mission to rescue certain ideas about photography from the dustbin of history.

  Making a dissent on Maier’s behalf, I want to point to a side of her work that harks back to the prewar European aesthetic, which American post–World War II photography implicitly repudiated and explicitly replaced—specifically, the humanist work of Henri Cartier-Bresson. Consider, for instance, one of Maier’s newsstand photographs below. The clash between color and black-and-white in this image calls attention to the underlying relationship between the two. The colorful patterns in the woman’s dress repeat horizontally, whereas the stack of monochromatic newspapers forms a vertical pattern of repetition. Despite the clash between the two, or maybe because of it, the dialectic between the patterns is what holds the picture together. Maier invited the viewer to see this continuity amid visual contrasts by aligning the hem of the woman’s dress with the base of the stack of newspapers.

  This sort of coherence underlying what at first seems like visual antithesis necessitates the sort of formalism mentioned earlier; thus do seemingly discordant elements reciprocate and reinforce each other to give the image its unity. Cartier-Bresson was the modernist master of this effect. His most famous picture is one from 1932, of a man trying to jump over the water flooding a courtyard behind the Gare Saint-Lazare in Paris (see here). Everything in the picture is doubled, including the image of the man himself as his upside-down reflection in the water comes up to meet him the instant before he lands. Beyond all the other shapes mirrored in the water, even the dance posters on the wall behind him, which mock his ungainliness with their gracefulness, were pasted up in duplicate side by side. This sort of graphic, abstract underpinning of a composition is seen in quite a few of Maier’s best pictures.

  A photograph of hers that has an almost identical formula, because of the way that both the shapes and colors of its two subjects mirror each other, is one made on the curb of a suburban street (see here). The shape of the woman’s torso in a white turtleneck framed by her brown jacket is the same as that of the white fish on the brown backing that lies on the curb before her. Her distracted glance askance is accentuated, contrasting with the graphic balance of the planked fish. In another Maier photograph, the gestures are not the same. Still, the hand jive in which the two women, who seem to be identical twins wearing identical glasses, are engaging gives this picture the same quality of a mirror image that the woman and the fish have in the other photograph (see here). Photographs like these require the photographer to see double in a sense—to imagine the composition instantaneously as an abstract pattern while simultaneously capturing it as an actual event.

  Location unknown, 1977–1978.

  Henri Cartier-Bresson, Place de l’Europe, Gare Saint Lazare, Paris, 1932.

  © Henri Cartier-Bresson/Magnum Photos.

  Location unknown, April 1981.

  Location unknown, May 1977.

  In some of Maier’s photographs, we really do see abstraction and human action together, as if she were illustrating the different layers of consciousness that formalist photography of this sort requires. The woman in the orange vest sits in the black chair under the orange-and-black painting (above). In another orange-and-black photograph, the man silhouetted in the foreground is the reverse of the shape of the Calder sculpture in the distance (below).

  Cartier-Bresson also had a quick-wittedness that Maier could match at times—instances in which timing is everything. These compositions dazzle us with expressive gestures or shapes that would have been too fleeting for us to have seen them on our own. In the photograph here, for example, the way that the hands in the lower part of the image and the fingers above them all go in opposite directions make the picture a balanced composition whose subject is an utter mystery; this discrepancy between art and content is what both compels and holds our attention. In the picture here, the women’s black coats fuse and turn the two of them into a single being, a misshapen creature in which youth and age are melded. It’s a contrast embellished by the way that one of the children in tow has a silly grin on his face, while the other is bawling—the masks of comedy and tragedy as a commentary on the image Maier has made.

  Location unknown, July 1979.

  Location unknown, 1977.

  Chicago, 1977.

  Cartier-Bresson was a master of capturing human frailty within perfectly formed compositions that somehow redeem their subjects, and his was an example that Maier could follow—and sometimes equal—along with the precedents that her own, contrary era might offer. She was a woman of many moods, and she lived a life with many phases. Maier was an elusive, fleeting figure in the history of photography who seems to have touched base coincidentally with many of the great figures of both her own time in America and the larger historical context of timeless photography. She was the “mystery woman” she said she was, the secret who sits in the middle and knows.

  In this regard, her fate was in fact like Atget’s, despite the challenge of comparing the two of them. When Atget died in 1927, he would have been lost to posterity if the young American photographer Berenice Abbott hadn’t rescued his archive from the trash heap and saved it until MoMA took it in 1968—just as Maier would have been lost had John Maloof and others not rescued her legacy. Since Maier never acknowledged which predecessors in the history of photography might have interested her or influenced her own work, she left it to us, post facto, to suss out the precedents to which that work bears comparison. Aesthetically, hers was a career that might link her to many photographers in the pantheon, especially where her strongest genre, street photography, is concerned.

  Eugène Atget, Boulevard de Strasbourg, 1912.

  © The Art Institute of Chicago/Art Resource, NY.

  “Photography is editing,” Walker Evans said. But Maier never did take this crucial step with her own work, so far as we know. In a sense, she did take a first step toward editing when she decided which of the negatives shot with her Rolleiflex to print. But the color slides shot with a 35-millimeter camera that are the subject at hand are full rolls of Ektachrome positives in mounts, just as they came back from processing. It’s not certain that she ever even opened the boxes and saw the results herself. Though the lack of information about her preferences for one picture over another may limit our ability to judge her as an artist, in another way it gives us an advantage. By having to sort through all the pictures and all the different moods and self-contradictions they contain, we do get a more complex understanding of her as a human being. Since she died before any of us could question her about the work, our effort to cope with all of it compels a fuller understanding of who she was. It gives us our only chance to pose all those questions we never got to ask her.

  —Colin Westerbeck

  Self-portrait, Chicagoland, 1978.

  Self-portrait, Chicagoland, 1975.

  Plates

  Chicago, November 1977.

  Self-portrait, Chicagoland, October 1975.

  Chicagoland, 1975.

  Location and date unknown.

  Loca
tion unknown, 1972.

  Location unknown, 1979.

  Chicagoland, November 1970.

  Chicago, September 1975.

  Chicagoland, November 1970.

  Chicago, October 1976.

  Chicago, December 1987.

  Chicago, 1979.

  Location unknown, 1979.

  Chicagoland, October 1975.

  Self-portrait, location and date unknown.

  Location unknown, 1975.

  Self-portrait, Chicagoland, date unknown.

  Chicagoland, October 1975.

  Location and date unknown.

  Chicago, 1956.

  Chicagoland, June 1976.

  Chicagoland, January 1978.

  Chicagoland, June 1978.

  Chicagoland, 1976.

  Chicagoland, March 1977.

  Chicagoland, April 1977.