In 2009, a 27-year-old history buff named John Maloof who had purchased a collection of photographic negatives from a Chicago auction two years earlier on impulse was in the midst of selling off his find piece by piece on eBay when he got an email from Allan Sekula, the well-known photographer and critic. Sekula advised the younger man that the 30,000-40,000 negatives in his possession — a windfall of images shot by an unknown female street photographer who had died in obscurity — would be more valuable if kept together.
“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 later wrote, after learning more about the photographer’s life.
These days few people who follow photography closely have not heard the name Vivian Maier (pronounced “Meyer”). It has been said that she deserves a place in the canon of 20th century photographers, though virtually no one who knew her was aware of the extent to which she took pictures, shooting more than 100,000 images during her lifetime. As Maloof made his find increasingly public on a blog, the veil lifted — the reclusive Maier, who died in 2009 just before her work began to garner attention, became the subject of reports on CBS, in the New York Times and, last year, on Ira Glass’s This American Life. Maloof himself even got into the game, co-producing a documentary about the photographer that is scheduled to be released in 2013.
Through mid-June, an exhibition at the Florida Museum of Photographic Arts offers a first-hand encounter with a selection of Maier’s photographs that were printed posthumously in 2012. Rather than Maloof’s collection — a small portion of which has been published as a slender but utterly delightful volume titled Vivian Maier: Street Photographer — the photographs in the FMoPA show, Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, hail from the collection of Jeffrey Goldstein, who purchased the negatives in 2010 from one of the two buyers who, along with Maloof, split the contents of an expired storage unit at a 2007 auction.
Lovely, striking and accompanied by an eponymous book that bills itself as Maier’s photo memoir, the exhibition is also slightly haunted by the question — would Vivian Maier have wanted any of this attention?
That she apparently never showed anyone her photographs during her life — with the exception of sometimes sharing pictures of children with their parents — suggests that Maier did not see herself as a practitioner like Robert Frank, whose photographic chronicles of daily life in America were published, celebrated and criticized in the 1950s and ’60s. Both personally and professionally, her life story could hardly have been more different from Frank’s, who derived from a well-to-do Swiss family and held jobs as a photojournalist while exhibiting his photographs at galleries and museums. Maier, by contrast, was born in 1926 in New York to French and Austrian immigrants of modest means, grew up the child of a single mother, and worked her entire life in lower-middle class jobs, including serving as a nanny in New York, Los Angeles and Chicago — where she made the bulk of her photographs — for some four decades.
Though consistently described as a brusque and unsociable personality (who committed the mid-century offense of dressing without regard to femininity), Maier’s peculiar rapport with people is clearly evinced by her photographs. The exhibition’s memorable portraits include two of elderly women: one tiny, bejeweled and wrapped in fur as she strides purposefully down a city street, the other gazing downward with an air of grief curiously offset by the voluptuous artificial roses decorating her hat and brooch. In both images, Maier demonstrates perfect pitch for the emotional tenor — equal parts objective observation and empathy blended with a keen appreciation for the absurd — characteristic of the finest street photography.
Her photographs of children, perhaps unsurprisingly given her work as a nanny, are even better — shockingly good. The FMoPA show includes several, but the pièce de résistance is a picture of a baby, probably around 1 year old, seated on a blanket outdoors, who lifts her hands behind her head and scrunches her brow in an expression that melds sunbathing with comic consternation. (Of course, knowing babies, she probably just had gas.) Another depicts a little girl in a swing shrieking at the camera with the pint-sized energy of an unrepentant hellion. Never in other photographs have I encountered the truth of children’s strange complexity as in Maier’s images.
Other highlights include Maier’s photographs of Chicago’s Maxwell Street Market — an open air flea market that in the 1950s and ’60s was a scene of bleak poverty and the co-mingling of races and immigrant histories; her documentation of the 1968 political demonstrations (including awesome shots of National Guardsmen lined up alongside DNC spectators and what appears to be an old woman gently heckling a police officer); and lively images of Chicago beachgoers frolicking in sand and water. To these shots of people, add a poetic body of still lifes and abstraction-leaning compositions of the scenes and detritus of Maier’s everyday life: rubber gloves on a windowsill, scraps of political posters in street gutters, and a handful of self-portraits of the artist as reflections and shadows. (By the end of the exhibition, you’ll feel as if you had traveled back in time to follow the most amazing mid-century black-and-white Instagrammer.)
Vivian Maier may not have wanted to come out of the shadows — and considering whether and why she didn’t may leave viewers with a queasy feeling about consuming this exhibition with relish. The reason we’re privileged to look at her photos is that at 81 years old, Maier could no longer afford to pay rent on a storage unit containing thousands of her negatives, as well as home movies, papers and clothing, which were eventually seized and sold at auction for a pittance. (Maloof paid less than $400 for his share.) But since a light has been shone on her work, we might as well take up the responsibility of looking and looking well.
This article appears in May 9-15, 2013.