Vivian Maier, Emerging Artist

This essay first appeared on the Renegade Image website in October 2011

ROLLEIFLEX by ikza

Much has been made recently of Vivian Maier, an obscure photographer whose enormous body of work has been gradually surfacing since her death in 2009. Ms. Maier, a native of New York and daughter of immigrants, worked as a nanny for most of her life, moving to Chicago in the mid-1950s. Over her lifetime, she produced over 150,000 images. John Maloof, a real estate agent and amateur historian from Chicago, discovered the first part of her legacy at an auction in northwest Chicago in 2007. Since then, Maloof has acquired many more artifacts and has enlisted the aid of qualified artists and curators to scan, mount, catalog and publicize the collection. It’s a fascinating, if not heroic, story that has been told by numerous parties including Chicago Magazine, WTTW-TV in Chicago andMaloof himself.

The story surfaces yet again in a piece by photojournalist Kevin Moloney in the Sept/Oct 2011 issue of Photo Technique magazine, a piece that originally appeared on Moloney’s blog. Taking the position that “fame is narrative,” Moloney examines not only Maier’s legitimacy as an artist and her right to a place on the world stage, but also the constant tension between the preservation of the artist’s voice and a critical assessment of the artist’s work. Moloney cites an interview with Colin Westerbeck (Chicago Magazine, January 2011), former curator of the Art Institute of Chicago, in response to the question about Maier’s likely position among acclaimed photographers. After acknowledging her savvy as a street photographer, Westerbeck concludes that Maier’s work lacks the level of irony and wit of some of her Chicago contemporaries. After declaring Harry Callahan and Yasuhiro Ishimoto to be the sterling against which a mid-century Chicago street photographer should be weighed, Westerbeck complains that Maier often put herself in the shot, something a more accomplished photographer would avoid. This is a curious statement given that acknowledged masters like Man Ray and Lee Friedlander often went out of their way to include themselves in their images.

What is disturbing about Westerbeck’s assessment that Maier “doesn’t stand out,” that she is lacking some essential qualitative ingredient, is the apparent nonchalance with which he is prepared to dismiss significant evidence to the contrary. I have only viewed the images that Maloof has made publicly available but am unable to conceive how anyone who spends adequate time with them can fail to see compositional brilliance, pathos, humor and, yes, wit and irony. Maier clearly studied the great photographers of her day. One could make the argument that she mimics icons like Cartier-Bresson, Brassai, Bing, Doisneau, and Kertész, among others. One could just as easily assert that Harry Callahan’s 1981 Morocco borrowed heavily from Cartier-Bresson’s 1933 Madrid. Artists develop a compositional memory of everything they’ve ever seen and constantly recycle their ideas and the ideas of others. Maier’s images are not cheap knockoffs of masterpieces; they stand on their own merit. I lack Mr. Westerbeck’s credentials and experience in formal art criticism. In a panel discussion of almost any topic of that nature, Mr. Westerbeck has me for lunch. Similarly, his senses may have been dulled by so many years as a curator — too much art, too many “promising” artists.

I think we must be kind to Maier when evaluating her images. She is an artist without a voice and the unfinished nature of her work offers many opportunities for missteps by those who labor to assemble the collection. Most of the images are in the form of negatives. She left 3000 prints. Are they finished or working proofs? Would she have cropped them? Did she have ample time in the darkroom to impose any artistic flourishes she envisioned? We don’t know. Her curators have made some assumptions that may or may not be correct. Imagine finding boxes of Ansel Adam’s negatives and processing them while knowing very little about him or the images. It’s unlikely that such an endeavor would reproduce the same iconic body of work that we now enjoy. It is also possible that Maier will eventually be regarded as an artist who showed great promise but lacked the opportunity to fully mature. Working in isolation as she did, it is unlikely that she had adequate interaction with qualified mentors and peers.

Returning to Moloney’s article, we find him in some accord with Westerbeck’s assessment that Maier “doesn’t stand out” but adds that her work “lacks, perhaps, the higher purposes of academic art where the artist strives for a statement, an irony, a challenge that may only be evident to academics or those who bothered to read the analytical preface of the book.” Moloney raises two issues with this statement. The first deals with the framework by which any artist is understood. Maier is both an emerging artist and one with a complete body of work. Her work is highly visible but has only been so for a very short time. She lacked the experience of dealing with galleries and publishers. It’s unlikely she ever fashioned an artist statement. As a result, the “narrative” to which Moloney refers has never been established. There is no roadmap to Maier, per se. The second issue is the way in which an artist approaches new work. Both Moloney and Westerbeck suggest that Maier lacked focus and structure in her approach. Some street photographers arrive on location with a clear idea of what they will shoot. They may even have a shot list. Others — Jay Maisel is a good example — have no preconceived ideas of what they will shoot and wait for the world to reveal itself. These are differences in work habits, not qualitative differences in the product. It’s difficult to read Moloney’s statement without detecting some spleen for that segment of the art world that expends more energy developing vapid concept statements than on producing the art itself. From what little we know of Maier, it’s likely she wouldn’t give a hoot about how her images were deconstructed by others.

Kevin Moloney seems uncommitted in his conclusions about Maier. He readily acknowledges the necessity for the work of the professional photographer to appeal to some segment of the population. A working pro must sell his work to pay the bills. Then he briefly abandons business reasoning and counsels us to “stay pure and chaste” in, I am assuming, our personal work. He concludes that Maier has maintained that purity, that integrity and, in so doing, has established herself as an artist deserving recognition. Maier quietly devoted her life to her art. Time will tell if she will be regarded as a master or as a quirky amateur of interest. I would like to think it will be the former and without an ominous asterisk next to her name to qualify her accomplishments.