She wonders, too, how Maier found the energy to take so many pictures, when the approach to her subject “was always the same”. Hesselholdt, poking her nose round the door again, reveals that at an exhibition of Maier’s photographs she saw in Helsingborg, she and a friend discussed how easily they tire of realism. The best of her work owes its veracity and spark to a split second of connection between herself and the stranger whose picture she is taking: she is a provocateur, uninterested in the question of permission – they are surprised, puzzled, indignant, furious. There is something sealed off about her she cannot quite fathom other human beings – and it’s this, surely, that drove her to take so many portraits. She knows that she is odd and yet she doesn’t know it at all. But there is something more purely satisfying about being inside Vivian’s head.įrom Finding Vivian Maier. There is magnificent comedy in the fact that she serves for dinner dishes (salted ox tongue) her non-European employers cannot stomach that they spend their time wondering what, exactly, she keeps behind her locked door (newspapers is the answer). Sarah and Peter learn to be deft in their handling of her Ellen, too, comes to understand that, as she is so stubborn and prickly, she must be treated with kid gloves, even by a little girl. Nevertheless, it’s with her that you want to be. (She was a hoarder Hesselholdt has one of her employers reinforce the floor of her bedroom with a metal joist.) Nor, thank God, does she try to make her likable: her rudeness and tendency to hector and bully are fully on show. Hesselholdt does not seek, particularly, to explain Maier however tough and peculiar her childhood, it does not entirely account for her compulsions. It’s a device that feels strangely old-fashioned: a postmodernism, flash but clunky, that seems to belong to another decade (the 1980s?) altogether. Hesselholdt inhabits them in a way that makes you feel as though she spent time interviewing them (Maier, incidentally, liked shoving a microphone in the faces of strangers almost as much as she liked ambushing them with her camera).īut her own voice is irritating and not only because her observations are frequently banal having effectively cast a spell on the reader, she keeps breaking it and in a way that serves no real purpose. In Vivian, the “dramatised scenes” in which different characters all describe the same, usually distinctly weird occurrence, from their own point of view, often work brilliantly. “In dark moments, I think I may have strayed into this horrible genre.” She’s right about this, but perhaps not in the way that she means. “I’m really not fond of documentaries with dramatised scenes,” this narrator writes late on in her book. Also, more intrusively, from a “narrator” who elbows her way into the story at various points, sometimes to ponder the significance of this or that event and sometimes to ask whether or not her technique is working. The polyphonic Vivian, translated by Paul Russell Garrett, is delivered in postcard-size chunks of first-person narrative by a smallish cast of characters (some are fictionalised, others are not): in addition to Maier herself, we hear from those with whom she spent her transient childhood in the US and in France (her mother was French) from Sarah and Peter, a wealthy Chicago couple who employ her as a nanny and from their daughter, her charge, Ellen. In 2013, she was the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, and now we find the bare bones of her life at the heart of a playful, tricksy and sometimes exasperating novel by the Danish writer Christina Hesselholdt. Ever since, she has been both a popular enigma and a celebrated artist, her photographs widely exhibited and increasingly expensive to buy.
VIVIANS MASTER SPELL ARCHIVE
But all that changed in 2009, when a collector who had acquired a portion of her archive put the images online. The 150,000 pictures she had taken on her beloved Rolleiflex during her lifetime – street portraits, mostly – had never been published many of her negatives had never even been printed.
W hen the American photographer Vivian Maier died at the age of 83 in 2009, impoverished and alone, no one knew who she was.