Saturday, December 20, 2014

Vivian Maier at Howard Greenberg

Few photographers have enjoyed such posthumous success as has Vivian Maier.  During her lifetime, she was totally unknown, a nanny who spent her spare time with Rolleiflex in hand pursuing black & white photography on the streets of Chicago and New York.  It was only in 2007, when the contents of a storage locker on which she had ceased to make payments were auctioned off, that she began to receive critical recognition.  By then it was too late - she died two years later at age 83 without ever having learned of the interest that had already begun to build.

Much of the credit for Maier's current renown is due to the efforts of John Maloof, a "Chicago historian and collector," who purchased the greatest part of the contents of the storage locker at auction.  It was he who first recognized Maier's talent and then promoted her work by scanning her negatives and placing them on the web where they quickly went "viral."  Maloof later co-directed and co-produced a film entitled Finding Vivian Maier that brought an even greater degree of attention to both the late photographer and her oeuvre.  If that were not enough, a lawsuit was this year entered in federal court challenging Maloof's right to ownership of the works' copyrights even though he had gone to the trouble of tracking down Maier's surviving family members in France and paying for the rights to the photos.  The suit has since received international attention for its bearing on intellectual property law.

It was against this background that I recently visited the current exhibit of Maier's photos at the Howard Greenberg gallery on East 57th Street.  It was a fairly small show held in a separate space off to one side and consisted of roughly thirty-odd black and white prints, most of them in 8x10 format, as well as a handful of badly faded small chromogenic prints, the latter dating from the period c. 1960-1976.  Not all the prints had been made by Maier herself.  The original prints, those from the storage locker, were noted on the price list as having been "made within Vivian Maier's lifetime."  When I asked, I was told that these works had either been made by Maier or by "printers she worked with."  Other prints from the photographer's negatives were only completed in 2014.  I was informed that these had been printed by Steve Rifkin, a photographer located in New York City.

Of the works on display, I found the most intriguing to be those in which a small detail gave away the character of the subject.  One example would be a 1956 color photo of a woman's hands held clenched behind her back in an awkward gesture.  Another was a black & white shot of a neatly attired middle-aged matron turning to look over her shoulder at a flashily dressed woman attempting to draw patrons into a dance hall.  The most notable was a 1965 black & white image, taken from a vantage point across the street, of a young woman being ogled by a group of suited men in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

It was clear to me, though, after having looked over the display that Maier was no master of the street photography genre on the level of a Robert Frank or Henri-Cartier Bresson.  Though Maier had talent, she was too timid in her approach to take that many incisive photos.  Most of her shots were taken from behind or from a safe distance, or else were of inanimate objects such as a parked car.  The photos in which she confronted her subjects head on were pretty much limited to studies of children who were powerless to take offense at her intrusion into their lives.  It was obvious that Maier went out of her way to avoid any situation that might result in a confrontation with her subjects.  That is probably one reason so many of her photos are self-portraits.

The main attraction in Maier's work, in my opinion at least, is the fact that she lived so long in total obscurity.  She apparently never approached any galleries during her lifetime (or was rebuffed by them if she did) or took any other initiative that would have brought her work to the attention of the public.  Photography was most likely for her only a hobby that brought its own sense of fulfillment.  Whether she wished it could have been more than that will now never be known.  Much of the adulation given her today derives, I think, from the posthumous nature of her success.  She has become an avatar for every photographer, artist or writer who has experienced a sense of frustration after having been passed over in his or her own career.  Through Maier's example, these individuals have been given new hope - though they may die totally unrecognized, perhaps some day in the future some discerning critic will stumble over their work and at last bring them the fame that they feel, rightly or wrongly, they truly deserve.  For most, this is unfortunately a rather forlorn hope.

The exhibit continues through December 31, 2014.

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