Vivian Maier: Unseen Work is on view at Fotografiska through September 29.
You don’t have to be a noticer to be a good street photographer. William Eggleston is much more a composer than a noticer; Bruce Gilden is a portraitist; André Kertész was a sorcerer and, to borrow a phrase from Saul Bellow, a heavy-water brain, but not a noticer. But it sure doesn’t hurt. Noticing is what distinguishes art from anonymity, what allowed Vivian Maier to capture Barthes’s “fifth type of surprise: the trouvaille or lucky find,” which isn’t really a matter of luck but of knowing how to look. She had an eye for faces. She quite often went for plain ones, though a new retrospective at Fotografiska would lead you to believe she also had a thing for the grizzled, the world-worked. There are several images of the backs of heads, reminiscent of the ones produced by Yang-Yang, the young amateur photographer in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000). “You can’t see it for yourself, so I’m helping you,” Yang-Yang says to one of his subjects. It’s not a stretch to imagine Maier extending the same generosity.
The wall text for Unseen Work describes Maier as an “invisible artist.” Invisible would seem to be pulling double duty, alluding to the fact that, like any street photographer worth her salt, Maier has a presence in this work that is both real and unseen, and that her output wasn’t discovered until after her death. This splitting of her ghost creates a curious situation. The artist and her work are two distinct, possibly competing entities. Every artist was someone who was not their creative output. It’s rare, though, for an artist’s biography to be nearly as well known as her work, perhaps even more so. This can happen when a wildly talented person has no intention of her art ever being seen.
The careerist view of creating leaves no room for art that is both serious and unknown.
The standard Maier story goes like this: longtime French-born nanny in the wealthy Chicago suburbs who turns out to be a hyperprolific documentarian of New York/ Chicago/points beyond is only discovered when her storage units are auctioned off to cover unpaid bills. This version is extremely reductive. It turns Maier’s photographs into an incidental product of the lore surrounding them and nearly equates her work with that of the person who first bought her negatives, John Maloof. Maloof’s Wikipedia entry describes him as a “filmmaker, photographer, and author.” In the New Yorker in 2014, Rose Lichter-Marck described him as “a real-estate agent, amateur historian, and garage-sale obsessive.” The unwitting midwife of his drastic reinvention was Vivian Maier. Without Maloof buying those foreclosed lots in 2007, we may have never known Maier. But Maier the person does not need anyone’s investment to be realized. Neither does Maier the photographer. Even if those four tons of stuff were still in storage, or burned, or bought by someone who never bothered to get the film developed, the work would still have existed. That it is being exhibited, admired, and shared is lovely, but that judgment is reserved for us, now. The work was Maier’s. The intention was Maier’s. The effort and compulsion and time were hers. Without wandering into a Brod-Kafka excursus, we can say that Maier’s art was an indisputable thing, whether or not it ever saw the light of day.
The problem is that because Maier’s story is easily condensed and highly digestible, Maier the myth can eclipse Maier the artist. A romantic, almost condescending current runs through a good deal of writing about her. In his introduction to the first published book of her photographs, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer (2012), Geoff Dyer hardly mentions the art, focusing instead on her biography and putative influences. “Some of the works are outstanding,” he concedes partway through the short essay, before turning back to the impact of “discovery-lag” on her reputation. A 2012 notice in the New York Times by Roberta Smith about two gallery shows is brief and effusive, and it treats its subject like Kaspar Hauser with a Rolleiflex. “A small dog with something in its mouth looks up at the camera,” she offers about the sole image described. This isn’t lazy writing or economizing for the sake of a word count. It’s purposeful dismissiveness. It’s the triumph of a reductive narrative. Maier the myth gets the column inches while Maier the photographer is reduced to her shadow, the embodied naïf, the woman in arrears. (For a welcome corrective to the prevailing story, seek out Pamela Bannos’s 2017 Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife.)
You don’t have to be a noticer to be a good street photographer. But it sure doesn’t hurt.
So what of Maier’s pictures? Unseen Work is her first major retrospective. (The show was put together with support from John Maloof.) It is not condescending or dismissive. It doesn’t dwell on her unknownness or nannying or her final years. (I was going to say “thankfully” before those last three words, but talking up Maier’s poverty and isolation wouldn’t necessarily make the folks profiting off her look great. We all have our motives.) It is presented cleanly and respectfully, across two underlit floors, with plenty of space for deep lingering and hushed conversation. It is austere. Very austere. Like, ritual austere.
You can treat work as serious without being funereal about it. Respect and gravitas aren’t synonyms. There is not a lot of gravity in Maier’s photos, and that is not a criticism. Her work is also spry and clever; it can be humane, and it can be piercing. The closest she comes to seriousness is a strain of loneliness that emerges, then subsides, then reemerges. The feeling is reflexive. Lonely subjects, lonely artist. The strangers she finds, almost always shot individually, seem to be searching for something inside her lens. The world they’ve been denied lives in Maier’s gaze, or so they might want to believe. Maier is a searcher herself. There are a handful of images of transit—the deck of the Staten Island Ferry from its empty passenger cabin; a spectral bus at night in Chicago; heads turned away from the camera on a train; sailors in a bus or train station, shipping out, coming home, doesn’t matter—that together create a feeling of people moving on without Maier, as though she’s documenting her own abandonment.
She belongs to the American city-observer tradition of Garry Winogrand, Elliott Erwitt, and Diane Arbus. She knew how to make herself at home on many streets. She was a visual listener. She understood that the moment outlasts the setting. Perhaps a better way to put it is that she was a cross between Saul Bellow and Flannery O’Connor, instantly intuiting the roiling inner dramas of the denizens of downtown Chicago and the spiritual void we tiptoe along. She was a first-class noticer, to use another helpful Bellowism.
Maier was also a goof. See the line of schlubs waiting for a parade of astronauts, the two men peering down at a piece of rubber tubing like it’s a dangerous serpent, the repeated pictures of old ladies scolding cops. She could be creepy. There are doppelgängers and images split by reflecting windows to suggest we’re witnessing colliding dimensions, as well as children in disconcerting forms—chalk outlines, distorted shadows, disembodied eyes or gloves—occasionally accompanied by poorly drawn friends. By the time she moved from black and white to color, Rolleiflex to Leica, she had developed an interest in newspapers. There is a sequence of Chicago papers in garbage cans, startling in the simple act of history hitting the dustbin, the news of the day crumpled and awaiting destruction.
The strangers she finds seem to be searching for something inside her lens. The world they’ve been denied lives in Maier’s gaze, or so they might want to believe.
The exhibition is divided into eight sections: “Self-Portraits,” “Clues,” “Theater of the Ordinary,” “Remarkable Identities,” “Subtle Gestures,” “Color Photography,” “Childhood,” “Kinetic Play.” Each has prefatory text by Anne Morin, the curator, and some have epigraphs by figures including Leo Tolstoy, Georges Perec, Andrei Tarkovsky, and Emily Dickinson. About those, I’m just going to copy what’s in my Notes app: “no!! wrong!! bad!” The Dickinson association is pat and mildly insulting to both of them; Tolstoy and Tarkovsky are baffling choices. Perec literally cataloged everything he saw from his chair in a café one weekend in Paris, distilling existence down to a kind of shopping list of facts. Unlike Perec, Maier didn’t aim to reduce what she saw or exhaustively catalog her surroundings. What her work declares is that the ordinary cannot be exhausted. People with balloons for faces live in the ordinary. Hands with no bodies do, too. The unalloyed drama of men asleep in public resides there. And Maier does, too. She knew exactly what to make of the obvious. It’s an endless, ridiculous mystery.
“Finally an architecture magazine that doesn’t just interview celebrities or cost ninety dollars.”
It’s worth saying something about art that is never meant for public consumption, created for its own sake. It’s not possible to create a unified theory of why people do this. Take another posthumously located Chicagoan, the writer and artist Henry Darger. Prodigious as they both were, it makes no sense lumping Maier in with a man who spent about 4,800 of the 5,000 pages of his autobiography writing about a sentient tornado. Nor would it be justified to call Maier a dabbler or an amateur. She understood photography intellectually, technically, and historically. There is little evidence that she was working toward notoriety, but the careerist view of creating leaves no room for art that is both serious and unknown.
This is the territory of compulsion and ritual and habit and unflagging interest and disappointment (or worse) and auto-exorcism. We’re left with a question that’s entirely speculative and philosophical: How much art has been made in quiet rooms just to get the sight out of one’s head, as Ford Madox Ford and my therapist would say? What if getting the sight out isn’t an act of purging but rather an act of aligning the interior and exterior? What if it’s a way of letting what’s seen and what’s felt map themselves onto one another? The ordinary world asks no questions and leaves bruises. Wouldn’t thousands of refined pages or carefully crafted pictures be worth the time, the effort, the invisibleness, if they helped that world make just a little sense?