Vivian Maier

Cyre Felix
4/30/2018
Prof. Cacoilo
Vivian Maier

The artist that I have chosen to write about is Vivian Maier who was born in 1926 in New York City. Vivian Maier is a street photographer who captured photographs of the people in her urban surroundings (New York and Chicago); She also used herself as a subject for her photographs, creating self-portraits. Below is a self-portrait that she took in 1955, Vivian Maier oftentimes used mirrors to do this. This would be the 50’s version of what we call a selfie today.

Self-portrait, 1955

Self-portrait, 1955

Self-portrait, 1957

Although she was from New York City, Maier spent her childhood living in France. Around 1951, she moved back to NYC where she found work as a nanny, she ultimately ended up working as a nanny for the rest of her life. On her spare time, Maier began to take photos, and create homemade films, during her time here, Vivian Maier took up to 100,000 negatives which were all left for us to discover. Although Vivan is an amazing photographer and gives us an artistic view of life in the twentieth century, there is little that is actually known about her personal life. What we do know though, is that her mother is Jeanne Bertrand, a French, award winning, portrait photographer.

Jeanne Bertrand

Fortunately, Vivian Maier has a website that houses information about her, her galleries/exhibitions, and her portfolio images. Because of this website, I learned that Maier enjoyed using her bathroom as a darkroom to develop her photos. She started her hobby off by initially using a “Kodak Brownie box camera with one shutter speed, no aperture, and no focus” (vivanmaier.com). Eventually she moved on to Rolleiflex camera and dabbled in different versions of it. 

Vivian Maier's cameras

The image above is a self-portrait of Vivian Maier with I am assuming, the boys that she was the nanny for. The reason why I love this photo so much is because it is mysterious, just like she is. In this self-portrait, her face is being covered by her camera, she included two boys that we have not seen in her other photographs, and the photo is not being taken in a traditional mirror, but in a cars side view\ mirror. Although it is mysterious, I can still feel her happiness from the photograph. While reading Vivian Maier’s biography, I learned that she nannied three boys that she loved dearly, and that being their nanny gave her a sense of motherhood which she loved. This photo allows viewers to feel the sense of happiness that Maier’s did during this photo, but also a sense of how much she loved sharing her life with these boys who she considered to be her own.

Vivian Maier was the original “selfie queen”. She took her hobby of taking photographs and made them into art that still gets featured in galleries today. In Finkelstein’s, The Art of Self Invention, she states that “we like to think social life is spontaneous and fresh. Yet the history of manners suggests otherwise” (102). This quote relates to Maier’s work but it also relates to present times with social media being a way for people to communicate with each other and feel validated about the way that they look. While using social media, we try to compete with our selfies and gain enough likes to feel good about ourselves. Taking selfies today may seem like something that is new but really all that is new is that we post them on an app for the world to see. Vivian Maier’s documented her life through photographs, and many of her photographs were of herself in mirrors, which is still something that we do. This proves that Finkelstein’s theory about social life being the opposite of spontaneous and fresh, is accurate.

Self-portrait, 1986

This is one of Vivian Maier’s color self portraits from 1986. This photo is similar to the undated colored self portrait in the sense that Vivian’s face is also covered by her camera. However, in this photo you can see how her skin is starting to look older, you can tell she is aging. While in the other photo Maier gives off a sense of happiness, this self-portrait has a gloomy setting. The room is filled with neutral colors, and Vivian is wearing dark colors. I feel as though this photo shows the audience that Vivian Maier’s life is calming down or potentially becoming increasingly dull as she is aging. She can also be blocking her face by the camera and covering her body with a black coat to draw attention to the changes occuring in her body and life due to age.

John Berger states in Ways of Seeing, that “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented; it then showed how something or somebody had once looked ~ and thus by implication how the subject had once been seen by other people” (10). This quote relates to not only this image of Vivian Maier’s but her entire collection of work. Unlike the people of social media today, Maier’s took self-portraits for the purpose of having records of the days in her life. This photo specifically will keep her audience in this moment, at the age she was, forever.


Vivian Maier's-CBS news

References:

• Finkelstein, Joanne, and Joanne Finkelstein Page. “The Art of Self Invention: Image and Identity in Popular Visual Culture.” Joanne Finkelstein: 9781845113964: Amazon.com: Books.
• JOHN BERGER - Ways of Seeing. waysofseeingwaysofseeing.com/ways-of-seeing-john-berger-5.7.pdf.
• “Official Website of Vivian Maier | Vivian Maier Portfolios, Prints, Exhibitions, Books and Documentary Film.” Vivian Maier Photographer, www.vivianmaier.com/.