The Vivian Maier story is truly amazing. An American woman who worked all her life as a nanny owned a professional-quality camera (a twin-lens reflex Rolleiflex which takes 6cm x 6cm negatives) and took it with her at all times, snapping street scenes. She took over 150,000 photos in her lifetime, had relatively few of them printed, none exhibited.
She died two years after a young collector and historian, John Maloof, chanced upon a cache of her negatives at a storage locker auction. The Vivian Maier story is as much the story of John Maloof, who recognised the intrinsic value of what he'd discovered, then sought to uncover the facts about Ms Maier and get her photos into the public eye.
Her photos are remarkable - they rank alongside the works of some of the great photographers of the 20th century - Elliot Erwitt being one that readily springs to mind. And yet, as a person Vivian Maier was incredibly withdrawn, obsessive (and an obsessive hoarder too). We know much about her from the families that employed her as a nanny, grown-up children talking about going on walks with her to the rougher parts of town as she photographed street scenes. Yet we don't know where she learned her craft. Were there piles of Popular Photography among her boxes of possessions? Did she attend night school?
Vivian Maier's visual style was predicated to a large degree by her equipment. Shooting with the Rolleiflex at waist height, staring down onto the focusing screen from above, she would have avoided eye contact with her subject. The square format meant one less compositional issue to worry about - whether to hold the camera vertically or horizontally. By the 1960s, the Rolleiflex appeared old-fashioned; her subjects did not take her as seriously as they would have taken a male photographer challengingly raising a single-lens reflex camera like a Nikon F with motordrive and big lens to his eye. The Rolleiflex had just the one, non-interchangeable lens, with a fixed focal length of 80mm (the equivalent of 48mm on a 35mm or full-frame FX digital camera, 32mm on a DX camera). In other words, neither a wide-angle nor a telephoto lens; one that approximates the angle of view of the human eye. To zoom the Rolleiflex, simply walk backwards or forwards until you get the right composition in your viewfinder. And you are limited to just 12 shots before you have to change film, which is not easy to do, especially in strong sunlight.
She took an average of around 30-40 rolls of film a month (360-480 photos), every month, for over three decades. A prodigious output - in later years she'd not even get round to having the films processed. All her films were processed by photo labs - she didn't have her own darkroom, we don't know whether she asked for her rolls of 6x6 film to be handled specially. Vivian Maier recorded a world that was being increasingly covered by photography. Yet compared to today - when an easy-to-use smartphone camera is in the hands of one-third of mankind, ready to record everything and share it online - there was very little material like this around. As the internet fills up with pictorial artefacts from our recent past, we see just how few street scenes there are that give us such profound glimpses into everyday life just half a century ago. Much of what we see is posed, stilted. But Ms Maier's photos are properly composed and offer context and meaning from which we can read so much.
To take photos like Vivian Maier these days is simple. Have a camera around your neck wherever you go. And snap. Snap and snap. There's no longer any cost of developing your photos - just upload them to your computer. You want black and white? Strip out the colour using photo editing software. You want square format? Crop to fit. Autofocus means you can have your camera at waist height, like Ms Maier did, dangling from its strap. You don't even need to look down onto the focusing screen to get the image sharp - the camera will do it for you. Photography has never been cheaper or technically easier.
I have given just 15 photos that I have snapped the full Vivian Maier treatment. Square crop, 100% colour desaturation, white frame. I tend not to upload my street photography online, but just this once, here's a short burst. Starting with one taken accidentally at the Leica Gallery in Warsaw (below)...
Below: Warsaw, May 2014
Below: Warsaw, May 2014
Below: Warsaw, May 2014
Below: Warsaw, May 2014
Below: Warsaw, Patelnia, May 2014
Below: Warsaw Metro, May 2014
Below: Warsaw, W-wa Śródmieście station, May 2014
Below: Warsaw bistro scene, June 2019
Below: Warsaw, July 2019
Below: On the train to Warsaw, July 2019
Below: bar underneath Warsaw West station, November 2019
Below: having fed the birds. Warsaw, December 2019
Below: Santa Claus is coming to town. Warsaw, December 2019
Below: Warsaw bar where you can still smoke, January 2020
Below: buying tickets, Warszawa Śródmieście station, September 2020
Below: encountering an alien, Metro Świętokrzyska station, June 2023
Below: ...and a Vivian Maier-style self portrait in a mirror
And there we are. Sixteen spontaneous snaps and a selfie, hardly any planning or effort. Camera set to 'program', autofocus, auto-ISO, auto-bloody-everything, kit lens, and a bit of work in the digital darkroom and there we are.
The bulk of what I snapped doesn't make the cut. The trick is in the editing. And here's where the hard work that John Maloof put into this project after his lucky find has paid off. If the canon of Ms Maier's work turns out to be some 1,000 images, of which 100 become instantly recognisable by future generations, it will be as much the merit of Mr Maloof in his role as Ms Maier's curator as of the photographer herself.
We can all take photos like Vivian Maier - but first we have to want to.
As leader of the legendary heavy-metal band Bad News, Vim Fuego said about his talent: "I could play Stairway To Heaven when I was twelve. Jimmy Page didn't actually write it until he was twenty-two. I think that says quite a lot."
This time last year:
Ethereal and transient
This time two years ago:
Wrocław railway station before the Euro football championships
This time three years ago:
By tram to Boernerowo
This time five years ago:
Food-Industrial Shop, rural USA or Poland
This time seven years ago:
Twilight time, Jeziorki
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2 comments:
HI,
Bit late commenting on a 2014 blog entry and I'm not even sure that anyone will see it, but here goes:-
You write:-
We can all take photos like Vivian Maier - but first we have to want to.
As leader of the legendary heavy-metal band Bad News, Vim Fuego said about his talent: "I could play Stairway To Heaven when I was twelve. Jimmy Page didn't actually write it until he was twenty-two. I think that says quite a lot."
What does that quote mean in this context?
Hi Unknown,
Thanks for the comment... Bad News, the band, appeared in a Comic Strip Presents comedy programme (well two actually) as a heavy-metal parody (pre-dating the more famous Spın̈al Tap). Bad News are ludicrously bad - but unaware of it, the musical equivalent of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Vim Fuego (played by Adrian Edmondson) is so full of himself that he doesn't see the irony of that quote... I do. I think that says quite a lot :-)
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