In 2007, John Maloof — one of those industrious people who trolls flea markets and public auctions looking to scavenge treasures — paid $380 for a bin that contained hundreds of negatives. A cursory examination of the images revealed a deep artistic intelligence behind the compositions. These weren’t quotidian snapshots but the work of a serious, unsentimental street photographer chronicling midcentury Chicago.
Maloof had never heard of the photographer, but a little detective work revealed she was Vivian Maier, an eccentric and private woman who made her living as a nanny.
She had once worked briefly for Chicago icon Phil Donahue. Maloof and co-director Charlie Siskel (a nephew of the late film critic Gene Siskel) won an auction for a storage locker owned by one of Maier’s former employers, acquiring in the process most of the possessions Maier — who died in 2009, only months before work on this film commenced — left behind. Along with her clothes, hats and uncashed income tax return checks were more than 100,000 negatives, 2,000 rolls of undeveloped black-and-white film and 700 rolls of color.
There was no question that the photographs were of extraordinarily high quality. Maier was a photographer of enormous talent — posthumously, she has become one of the most sought-after American photographers. Her work has been displayed in museums. Collectors pay premium prices for her prints.
Finding Vivian Maier is an investigation into who she was and why she never sought much attention for her work during her lifetime (the sheer amount of undeveloped rolls says something about her lack of ambition — maybe it was enough for her to frame and snap the picture, maybe she wasn’t so interested in the end product as the process, or maybe she was just too poor or cheap to pay for developing). It’s often fascinating, occasionally frustrating and, by the end of it, you might wonder exactly how much Maloof stands to gain financially from the publicity the film generates. After all, Maier was estranged from her family and left no descendants — he’s the one who’s printing and selling her work now.
The deepest questions can’t really be answered, but the film does a good job of sketching a portrait of Maier through a series of talking heads — children she cared for (now slouching comfortably into middle age, admitting their fear and fascination with their stern, weird nanny who, aside from her ever-present Rolleiflex, never displayed much artistic inclination), a long-lost cousin, even Donahue, who admits he never really got a handle on her and that she only worked for him a few months.
While some of the former charges hint at a dark side of Maier — she beat them, though apparently not badly — this never coalesces into more than a mean streak (the original Mary Poppins, the one in the books, had one too). And though eventually we’re presented with some evidence that suggests Maier knew she was a good photographer and that she might have harbored some aspirations for her work, the mystery is never truly solved. Maier reminded me a little of Henry Darger, the Chicago janitor who became famous for his posthumously discovered science fiction manuscript (which ran more than 15,000 single-spaced pages) The Story of the Vivian Girls, in What Is Known as the Realms of the Unreal, of the Glandeco-Angelinian War Storm, Caused by the Child Slave Rebellion and the hundreds of drawings and paintings that illustrated his story.
But I’m pretty confident in saying that Darger was mentally ill — his art grazes genius but ends up tangled in the weeds, self-suffocating and insulated. But Maier’s photos, which make up the best part of the film, are simply stunning, gracefully composed arrangements of light that reveal something about the city and the people Maier caught in her unflinching gaze.
And they reveal something about her too, though it’s not sentimentality. (One of her former wards remembers an incident where he was knocked down by a car. He wasn’t badly injured but he was surprised to see his nanny taking photographs rather than comforting him.)
Finding Vivian Maier is a highly enjoyable film, but there’s a voyeuristic edge to it that bothers me. Is it really OK to make public these pictures, to make prints that the photographer never saw? Watching the film, I felt the filmmakers could have been more empathetic to their subject, whom they seem to regard as an exotic and somehow silly bird. But the testimony of her photographs is clear: Vivian Maier may be a mystery, but she’s not a curiosity.
Finding Vivian Maier
87 Cast: Documentary Directors: John Maloof, Charlie Siskel Rating: Not rated Running time: 83 minutes