Finding Vivian Maier

In 2007 John Maloof, a local historian in Chicago, found a huge stack of film negatives in an auction and began scanning them. It quickly became clear that they were of some artistic importance, so he tried find out more about the elusive woman who took them: Vivian Maier. Unfortunately by the time he’d put the work together and tracked her down, she had passed away in early 2009.

This documentary follows his efforts to finish developing her film, looking at the images, making prints of them, and ultimately trying to gain some posthumous recognition for Maier through various gallery showings and print sales.

There’s no denying that the images we see are objectively good, and I can see why they have resonated with so many people. I love the pictures too!

I struggle to get over the ethical concerns around publishing her work. This is a woman who lived a long life and took pictures for most of it. There were hundreds of thousands of negatives Maloof managed to dig up in the end. Why didn’t she attempt to share her work with the world? I can only think it’s because she didn’t want to.

In addition to this, the work wasn’t finished when she was alive. An undeveloped negative is not the end product of a photographer. A print is. A gallery show that started as 100,000 photo negatives stuffed into boxes, un-sorted and un-curated, is just as much a statement of John Maloof’s artistic intent as it is Vivian Maier’s - and she has no way to refute this.

Maloof tackles this head on in the film, and makes his case for it. He says that someone like Garry Winogrand had lots of unfinished work published posthumously. I don’t agree that that was right either, nor that it was as good as what he did when he was alive. I do applaud that Maloof gives some air time to the case against what he is doing, and that he doesn’t seek to silence his critics.

Say what you will about Maier’s work and how it came to be, this is a story worth telling and a fascinating documentary. Maier was a nanny by trade and the numerous interviews with the children she looked after, along with some of her ex-employers, help to paint a vivid portrait of a complicated, confusing, eccentric, interesting life.