In 2007, a real estate agent bought some boxes of undeveloped negatives at a lost property auction. Inside is the life of a nanny who for thirty years photographed the streets of Chicago without showing anything to anyone
In 2007, a young Chicago real estate agent pays a few dollars for some boxes at a lost property auction. There are thousands of negatives inside. John Maloof looks at them one by one: women smiling, children running, old men walking in the wind. And every now and then a woman reflected – in a shop window, in a glass, in a shadow. The name comes later.
That woman’s name was Vivian Maier and she was a nanny. She died in 2009, at eighty-three years old, without knowing that she had become one of the most beloved photographers of the century she had lived through. Without knowing that he had stopped the breathing of the people he portrayed forever.
The Chicago nanny with the Rolleiflex around her neck
Let’s go back to the 1950s. He is thirty years old, walking through the streets of Chicago with the Rolleiflex hanging around his neck, a dark hat on his head and the pace of someone who doesn’t have to get anywhere. Look at everything: the reflection of the sky in the shop windows, the shoes of passers-by, the distracted expressions. She photographs without being seen, as if the world belonged only to those who observe it in silence. As if the pieces of the world scattered on the streets and embodied by people were his stuff.
For a living, he lives in other people’s homes and takes care of other people’s children. His photographs are in closed boxes, crammed into attics and garages: rolls of film that no one prints. In the families who host her, no one imagines having one of the great photographers of the twentieth century in their home.
An archive of never developed negatives
Accumulating is his way of breathing: films, clippings, newspapers, clothes, tickets. He doesn’t throw anything away, as if there was a crumb of meaning in every object. A life that becomes an archive, a labyrinth of fragments, rooms full of memories that he has not lived to the full. He keeps everything with him, so much so that there are stories of floors bending under the weight of the stacks of newspapers. So much so that she is considered an unstable person.
Vivian Maier’s photos: suburbs, common faces, ordinary gestures
Its stability is the people. Look for slivers of normality, of humanity: faces, smiles, true expressions, caught in the truth of existence. Women doing the shopping, children playing in the dusty courtyards, men sitting in front of the front door, ladies fixing their stockings with a quick and unconscious gesture. He loves the suburbs more than the centres, ordinary faces more than celebrities, ordinary moments more than important occasions. His street photography is all there, in a city crossed on foot. Photograph life as it is: blurry, lopsided, beautiful. Unstable.
And she photographs herself to give herself space. A mirror, a glass: Vivian Maier’s self-portraits are dozens, and in none does she seek anyone’s gaze. Vivian photographs Vivian. Maybe to witness one’s own existence.
Selfies before selfies
Today the image is above all an exhibition. She practices the opposite: photography as subtraction, as proof of a normality that becomes extraordinary. Looking at his shots you think that he photographed so as not to disappear, and there is something prophetic in that need to exist through the reflection. A gesture that today has changed its name – selfie – and has retained its intention. Vivian Maier did it without asking for spectators. We, on the other hand, no longer know how to live without it.
Maybe, with his outbursts and his accumulation of things, he didn’t want to preserve the world. Just don’t miss it entirely.
