Vivian Maier snapped pictures of a thousand other lives while making the lightest impression on life herself. In her biography Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, author Ann Marks attempts to find the “real” Vivian Maier but is less than successful. A self-made mystery woman, Maier remains mystifying, though Marks’ book inspires a few interesting thoughts on her, her hoarding, and society’s rapaciousness for dead, easily branded artists.
The more familiar part of Maier’s history happened two years before she died. Bidding on separate abandoned storage unit auctions, two men discovered a hundred thousand photographs and negatives taken by Maier over a lifetime. Struck by her talent and output, one buyer shared her photos online. Word leaked, buzz commenced, and a legend grew. Cursory research turned up her name, Vivian Maier, and occupation, nanny. Once upon a time, Maier walked Chicago’s streets like a prim specter, specializing in street photography and self-portraiture. The story and Maier’s better snapshots caught the public’s attention, and a legend was born, or rather a brand was manufactured.
Maier has since joined a coterie of other secret and solitary artists like Vincent van Gogh, Henry Darger, and Francesca Woodman: unknown or unappreciated during their lifetimes, but catching fire after their deaths. In Maier’s case, anonymity, abundance, and an intriguing back story—the puzzling, Poppinsesque amalgam of Arbus and Cartier-Breton—sealed her brand. A good enough story to justify two documentaries, several gallery shows, and a KOBRA mural in Wicker Park. Maier became famous without revealing much. Marks does her best to corporealize the photographer, but her subject’s essence remains elusive.
Through intense research and very plain prose Marks demonstrates that Vivian Maier was an individual not an icon. Rather than a talented blank, Maier was a devoted artist and well-traveled and cultured woman. She kept herself to herself, even as she inserted herself into several families’ lives. Marks’ Maier is a more fully realized creature than the phantasmal nanny she was in her accidental caretakers’ hands. But what’s especially interesting is Marks’ revelation of Maier as a hoarder of junk as well as images, which raises some interesting parallels with other deceased artists.
Acquisition is America’s Original Sin. We spend much time collecting stuff, and are encouraged to do so from cradle to grave. Acquisitiveness is viewed as unhealthy, however, when it devolves into Diogenes syndrome, more commonly known as hoarding disorder. The Collyer brothers were a worst-case scenario in the 1940s. Their Harlem mansion filled with mountains of trash and deathtraps—the latter leading to their mutual demise after decades of isolation. Yet, no art exhibitions, documentaries, or coffee table books emerged from the Collyers' pile of garbage.
Diametrically, the cluttered confines of Andy Warhol’s Upper East Side home begat a decades-long art show. Cosmopolitan shopaholic Warhol gathered a flabbergasting collection of oddments—notes, photos, magazines, toys, jewelry, candy wrappers, letters, and other miscellaneous nonsense—creating a plasticized Xanadu. Warhol being Warhol, he made art from junk and appointed his assistant Benjamin Liu and others to gather, pack, and seal 610 medium-sized boxes of pop cultural detritus he had laying around the manse. Starting in late 1991 and ending in 2014, Warhol’s “Time Capsules” were opened one after the other before various audiences, and later stored in full view at Warhol's museum in Pittsburgh. Visiting the museum, one may view a roomful of Andy’s glamorous crap.
In another case of high art meeting hoarding, Vivian had a contemporary in Henry Darger (whom I mention here too often). A peculiar man who lived alone in a Webster Avenue studio apartment, Darger eventually grew enfeebled and moved to an old-age home. Cleaning out the apartment, his landlord discovered, amidst piles of newspapers, comic strips, Pepto-Bismol bottles, and more, a massive book filled with stories about seven heroic hermaphroditic girls accompanied by beautifully horrifying illustrations of blood-soaked battles, torture, and bad weather.
Both Darger and Maier were Chicagoans. Darger lifelong, and Maier from 1956 through 2009. The two shared similarities beyond their location. Both were artistically inclined, deeply private, and living on slippery mental ice—Darger more so on the last two. When not incarcerated in a looney-bin for kids in Jacksonville, Illinois, Darger spent his life working peon gigs, attending mass, creating art, and writing his 15,000-page “novel.” Having few records, a single friend, and rarely speaking to anyone, the trail of Darger’s life is largely unmarked. He will remain a perfect mystery.
I mention Darger mostly because he was of a generation who could still die anonymously. Marks benefits from a more recently born and deceased subject, enjoying all the blessings of genealogy sites and recreational DNA testing as well as public records. Even a self-imposed invisible woman like Maier can’t escape the biographer’s butterfly net. Maier preserved bits of herself as well through portraits, tape recordings, and several still-living individuals who knew her, though only as children. Even so, Marks has trouble finding Maier, and the fault lies with her subject who, while not a misanthrope, kept others at arm’s length through deadbolts and silence. Maier’s thoroughness at removing herself (sometimes literally, as she “quit” some jobs and escaped by night) leaves very little Maier to reveal.
Marks’ research skills are impressive. Her biggest coup is tracking down Maier’s brother, Charles, who was a fabulous disaster. As musically talented as his sister was photographically, Charles lived a troubled life, bouncing between reform school, prison, the military, and mental illness. Fascinating background for the Maier family, though Marks take liberties with it. While it seems clear that Vivian was odd, Marks, like too many biographers connects dots and paints numbers that might not be there. We encounter speculation and psychologist evaluations exploring whether Vivian was neurodivergent (maybe), the victim of abuse (maybe), or afflicted with this or that psychological condition (maybe) like her mother and brother (maybe) with no real evidence. Post-mortem diagnoses are pointless, and we’ll never know if Maier is the patron saint of lesbians, aspies, enbys, asexuals, or what/who-have-you.
Maier’s eventual exploitation—if there’s a better word, let’s hear it—is familiar and cliched. Like her out-of-place chapter on genealogical tips, and several pointless side bars (“Celebrities Photographed by Vivian Maier,” “Vivian Maier’s Bookshelf”), one wishes Marks had skipped Maier’s “afterlife” as a commodity. It’s a tacky tale of auction winners, lawyers, and distant relatives who apparently remembered dotty old cousin Viv once they were located. It’s unseemly, considering how swiftly the world tossed Maier aside when she turned into that most useless of creatures, an older woman.
In Vivian Maier Developed, we meet Maier not as a final draft, but an interesting outline. She was a weirdo, that’s for sure, though it takes one to know one. An average-looking, hard-working, artistically inclined outsider with Vaseline in her hair, who drank left-over meat grease, and acted in ways that perhaps made more sense in the French villages where she spent her youth. Speaking of la République… A French-speaking friend introduced a phrase to my vocabulary I take every opportunity to drop: Poussières de Vie. Translated as dust of life, it refers to the various materials we accumulate—ticket stubs, fliers, and, naturellement, photographs—and leave behind. Vivian Maier left much poussières behind. Who could’ve imagined it would be so lucrative? Shabby.
Maier snapped her last pic in 2008, still shooting to film, and died in 2009. One wonders what might have been if Vivian had purchased a digital camera before dementia seized her, and a friendly hipster with an Soviet camera acquainted her with photo zines and websites. She was around for Flickr (site of her imposed debut), but missed Instagram by two years
What might have happened? Would she have blended in with the digital crazy-quilt of the '90s Worldwide Web? Would finding her work online versus stored away in an abandoned storage unit have had the same impact? Best case scenario, one imagines a late-in-life career renaissance, where Vivian becomes the grand-mère with a camera stalking '90s Wicker rather than Rogers Park. An elderly Arbus in floppy hats and shirt dresses, adopted by the Lumpens or haunting Quimby’s Queer Store. At least it would have justified the KOBRA mural’s location.
But she didn’t, and she died, leaving her estate up for grabs by savvier people than herself. One kindness, before she died she was looked after by the Highland Park family who once hired her to mind their boys—apparently her favorites of all the children she cared for. When she died, they spread her ashes in a forest preserve strawberry patch they frequented with her. Magic.
Ultimately, do we know Maier better because of Marks’ book? Marks learned more about her than anyone, but only slightly more. Despite her best efforts, we’ll never get a fully developed picture of Vivian Maier. Just glimpses. Largely the fault of Ms. Maier herself. Marks’ Maier suggests Lady Alroy, subject of Oscar Wilde’s short story “The Sphinx Without a Secret.”
Briefly, two university chums run into one another. One, a British lord, shares a sad tale of lost love. Wooing Lady Alroy, he learns of her strange habit of providing alternate addresses and visiting a lodging house, wearing a veil. They fall in love, but Lady Alroy continues to engage in her odd machinations. The lord confronts her, asking if she is engaged in something illicit. Tearfully, the lady denies it, but the lord breaks up with her. Being a Victorian melodrama, she dies of a chill caught at the opera. The lord digs further, visiting the lodging house and discovering…very little. The landlady tells him Lady Alroy spent her time there sipping tea and reading novels. The narrator imagines he’s figured it all out. Lady Alroy simply loved pretending to be a woman of mystery, but declares her a "Sphinx without a secret." Yet, the lord can't it go. He looks at her picture and utters a resigned, "I wonder..."
Despite the wealth of information she’s dug up, Marks leaves us wondering as well. Perhaps a little more knowledgeable about Maier’s peculiar life, but no more understanding of who she was. A secret without a sphinx, perhaps.
Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny is available at bookstores and through the Simon and Schuster website.
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