Few things fascinate like a double life. And nanny
Vivian Maier had one.
Her workaday world involved minding the children
of well-to-do Chicago families. But Maier's private life was her own, closely
guarded and hidden from view.
Until now. After Maier died at 83, she
moved from obscurity to art world prominence.
In 2007 a Chicago auction
was held of a mysterious cache of negatives found in an abandoned storage
locker. In a serendipitous move, Chicago real estate agent John Maloof paid $400
for the images. Maloof essentially discovered the enormous output of this
unknown nanny, who turned out to be a talented street photographer who took
thousands of photos during her lifetime but never shared them with anyone.
Maier's photographs have proved to be a treasure trove of a unique
photographic sensibility and a window into 1950s and 1960s America, as seen
through one woman's eyes.
For anyone who romanticizes the 1950s or '60s
as a more innocent, less brutal time, Maier gives evidence to the contrary in
her shots of disheveled drunks, the homeless, a man being hauled away by the
police or the carcass of a dead horse and a road kill cat in city gutters.
Maloof has published a book, “Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,”
featuring some of the exceptional black and white images Maier shot. And since
that inspired initial purchase in 2007, Maloof has acquired more than 100,000 of
Maier's images.
Following his lead, an entire cottage industry of Maier
interest has arisen, with gallery exhibitions, a documentary film in the works
and the emergence of another collector, Jeff Goldstein, who procured his own
collection of Maier prints and a catalog of 15,000 negatives.
Atlantans
can see fascinating photographs drawn from the Goldstein archives that make up a
small portion of Maier's impressive body of work at Buckhead's Jackson Fine Art,
where 20 contemporary prints and seven vintage prints are on view.
Maier's quirky, charming black and white images, shot with a medium
format Rolleiflex camera,,
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bring to mind such masters of the form as Elliott Erwitt, Lisette Model, Ruth
Orkin, Helen Levitt, Walker Evans and iconic French photographer Henri
Cartier-Bresson, the subject of an exhibition last year at the High Museum of
Art.
Born in New York to a French mother, Maier grew up in France after
her father abandoned the family when she was 4. Maier returned to America
sometime in the 1950s to work as a nanny.
Though she's been
characterized as a slightly eccentric Mary Poppins-type who would whisk her
young charges away to the Chicago stockyards, art films or a Chinese New Year
parade for a field trip, don't expect anything Disney from Maier's work.
A streak of sophisticated wit is evident in images like one shot through
a father's milk-white legs as he hefts a chunky baby out of the ocean surf. In
an equally funny image of large-meets-small, a chubby toddler sitting on a
blanket hefts a baby doll above its head. The doll's humorously sideways
expression suggests a tiny creature caught in Godzilla's clutches.
In
addition to gravitating toward such funny views of daily life, Maier's images
are equally arresting for their formal properties, including a real knack for
off-kilter compositions.
Maier never married or had any children, yet
her images capture the unique spirit of children. She was clearly very fond of
them. An image of a young boy, dressed up and sporting eyeglasses with a lens
blacked out with paper — suggesting an injury of some kind — is a heartbreaker.
He's standing in the road and his vulnerability is palpable.
While some
photographers render children cute, Maier's images suggest their complex
interior lives, a circumstance she no doubt learned while on the job.
City life is another favorite Maier theme, conveyed in images of a
homeless man folded into himself, crouched on a city sidewalk.
Never
dwelling in just one key, Maier also conveyed the joy and vibrancy of city life,
in groups of African-American children playing on the streets or a humorous shot
of an intertwined couple kissing on a beach, lost to the teeming crowds around
them.
Though New York photographer Weegee famously made his elderly
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There is more evidence of
Maier's unique sensibility in her many clever self-portraits. A tall, simply
dressed woman, Maier can be glimpsed in photographs of her shadow on the
sidewalk, reflected in a shop's security mirror or as a distorted reflection in
a plate glass window. These canny self-portraits suggest any photographer's
hidden presence, lurking in the margins of their own photos.
Maier's
nanny vocation and photographic avocation were mirror images of each other. As a
nanny, Maier had special access to the private lives of her employers. But such
hired help is also kept at a distance. Maier was thus a three-fold outsider: a
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Maier retired from nannying sometime
in the 1990s, but at least three of the children she cared for remember her
fondly. John, Lane and Matthew Gensburg, whom Maier tended to growing up in
Chicago, took care of their beloved nanny in her old age. They ensconced her in
a nice apartment and ensured she had great medical care while she recuperated
from a fall in 2008.
Maier died in 2009. She was described as a “second
mother” to the Gensburg boys in her obituary, which helped Maloof track Maier's
identity down after his spontaneous purchase of those mystery negatives in 2007.
Like too many artists, Maier worked in obscurity when she was alive, and
has only found fame after death. But her work lives on, providing fascinating
insight into one woman's unique vision of life.
