Abigail Solomon-Godeau on Vivian Maier

"Maier’s life-long picture taking, made primarily in public space, was anything but the hobby of an amateur, despite its private motivation. To what extent this was a function of her asocial existence, her extreme eccentricity, her apparent asexuality, who can say? Like so much else of Maier’s life and work, this is not an answerable question. What one can say is that in some mysterious and indeed, poignant way, Maier lived her adult life through the camera’s lens, a vicarious life in which the camera “eye” and the subjective “I” were inextricably linked. I know of no such other example in the history of photography. But an important point to be made is that like photojournalism, photographing on the street is a quintessentially masculine preserve. The reasons for this are many, and include the masculine prerogatives of active looking, the gendered attributes of public space, the relative vulnerability of women within that space, and the aggressive aspects of photographing unwitting subjects."

I have posted a couple of times here on Vivian Maier and last night this link appeared on my FB news feed (Thanks Meg!) to a critical appreciation of Maier (from which I've lifted the quotation above) by Abigail Solomon-Godeau.

Vivian Maier and the Critics

"We can’t know the full story behind this self-portrait, or behind the many thousands of images left in a storage locker in Chicago. But we can look at the range of Maier’s work and see the tantalizing evidence of artistry and ambition, and we can look at the expression of the woman reflected in the sheet mirror and see her indisputable pleasure. This is no frumpy old bird woman looking at her own pathetic destiny. This is a woman who knows what she wants, who has chosen to do her work free of judgment and commerce, and who is in charge of the scene."

Self-portrait © Vivian Maier

Some time ago I posted very briefly on the death and rediscovery of Vivian Maier; recently my UofR colleague, novelist Joanna Scott, published this smart essay at The Nation on Maier and, especially, Geoff Dyer's dismissive, patronizing interpretation of her work. Scott punctuates her essay with the passage I've lifted above.  As an aside, I think that Scott's assessment of Maier exemplifies nicely the point that David Levi Strauss made recently (link here) regarding the importance of criticism in establishing non-monetary criteria for assessing creative work.

Vivian Maier (1926-2009)

Photograph © Vivian Maier

I came across this story today on the rediscovery of Vivian Maier. It is not exactly an obituary, more a remembrance and celebration. And since the images mostly depict of Chicago, I find them especially interesting.

Markets, Copyright, Photography

As, I've noted here before, Vivian Maier's work is astonishing. And now it is being bound up in legal knots by a bunch of men who never met her. You can get details here at The New York Times. I suspect nothing good will come of this.