VIVIAN MAIER!!!!

Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier

I have been gradually falling deeply in love with the work of Vivian Maier over the course of this whole year. I have been interested in other photographers, but it is Vivian Maier whose work cracks my heart wide open and makes me cry. My passion for her way of seeing has become the standard by which I judge all photographs.

She never exhibited her pictures. She didn't share them. She had no Blip or Flickr. She got no grants. No museums bought her work. No magazines published it. Nobody said yes to her. Nobody commented on her work or encouraged her. She worked as a child-minder and care-giver till she was in her seventies. She was fierce and proud and poor--late in life desperately poor, so poor that her life's work was confiscated from a storage area she could no longer pay for and was auctioned off to pay her storage bill. During many years she used rolls of black and white film that only made twelve square prints per roll, film that she scrimped and scrounged to pay for. One camera shop where she bought film said she fished small change out of all her pockets to buy film. Often she couldn't afford to develop it. But she kept taking pictures, after the 1970s on slide film, until 2008.

Until today I knew only her street photography as publicized in the book based on the John Maloof collection. Maloof created the website Vivian Maier Photographer. But today I saw for the first time the book by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, based on the collection of Jeffrey Goldstein, who has created the website Vivian Maier Photography. Cahan was recently in Portland talking about his book and about Vivian Maier, and I MISSED IT. But the exhibit of her work is still up at Powell's Bookstore downtown, where it will be for the rest of this month. If you're anywhere near Portland and you love photography, go see it. Sadly the book is $60. She couldn't have afforded to buy a copy of it, and she would have been furious at the many typographical errors on the cards next to her pictures. The exhibit calls itself a "Photo Memior" (sic) and the cards include sentences so full of errors that they make no sense. She was a perfectionist and a stickler for detail. She would be enraged by this slovenliness. But the pictures, beautifully printed on fiber-based paper with selenium toning, are breath-taking.

She didn't just do street photography, although that was her first passion. She did still life. She took many pictures of the children who were her charges in her career as a nanny. She did more women and children than anything else. No male photographer could have had access to her subject matter--they would have seemed invasive or threatening. Only a woman could have done what she did, but she also did stunning portraits of men, most unposed, and streetscapes, cityscapes, shadows, and whatever her eyes loved. It is said she left over 100,000 negatives, but that's just a vague estimate. Boxes and boxes of color slide film have still not been developed. All her work between about 1972 and when she died in 2009 is yet to be sorted and seen. I would love to see it.

The pictures are erotic to my eyes: richness of tone, curves, intimacy. I am happy to have seen them.

On the way home in the pouring rain, I got another of those Saul-Leiter-style wet street pictures. It was a glorious day.