"Finding Vivian Maier" - review

A fascinating yet harrowing portrait

For me, the photographer’s eye has always been a maddeningly elusive talent.  All my life I have struggled to capture through the lens what I see around me.  When something I’ve snapped a picture of even approximates the feeling in my mind, I experience a euphoric surge of accomplishment, primarily because these achievements are so exceedingly rare and precious.  A person who can preserve the essence of every moment with nearly every click of the shutter seems to me to have powers of perception bordering on the mystical.

Vivian Maier had this unerring eye, and yet her astonishing street portraits of the citizens of New York City were seen by few while she was alive.  They might have been lost forever had it not been for John Maloof, a young real estate agent and frequent auction attendee who was looking for photographs for a local history project.  John bid on a box containing a hefty quantity of negatives, but despite the striking nature of the pictures, they did not apply to John’s current project.  The true enormity and significance of the discovery would remain secret for a little while longer as Vivian's work was consigned to storage for a second time.

In the interim, the impact of the images refracted in John’s subconscious, and when he took them out again and examined them more closely he realized that he had to find out who Vivian Maier was and to make her pictures known to the world.  John’s journey was long and arduous, as the scope and breadth of Vivian’s work could have easily consumed the entirety of any museum’s human resources to properly catalog such a massive collection.  After sharing some of her pictures online, John was at last able to locate and interview people who personally knew Vivian, and the story of her life that unfolds is both enthralling and haunting.

The initial reminiscences about Vivian paint her as a frumpy but appealing woman whose surreptitious yet piercing pictures are astounding in their combination of guarded remove and furtive intimacy.  Vivian was never without a camera, and as a nanny for many New York families over the years, she went everywhere.  Her urban adventures with her wards seem charming and innocuous, but then a dark side suddenly slithers out from the shadows to coil around your heart like an icy, implacable python.  Vivian Maier had demons, and was driven by them to do and say some horrid things.

These revelations are shocking at first, but they make Vivian’s story and the photographs that accompany them even more interesting and revealing than before.  What began as a breezy examination of the artists’ work becomes a dark descent into a damaged soul.  Vivian’s compulsion to take the kinds of pictures she did has a painful parallel to the slow, methodical stitching up of a near fatal wound.  The process is laborious and painful, and though a scar will always remain, it is the only way to begin to heal.  As Vivian’s personal history is more deeply explored, a new and even more complex interpretation presents in equal measure the horror and beauty of human life.