Cool Art


VIVIAN MAIER - HER DISCOVERED WORK

Photo by Vivian Maier / Courtesy of Maloof Collection

What excites me about Vivian Maier’s photography is that it was found. A guy in Chicago bought some of the contents of an abandoned storage locker at an auction. What he had actually bought turned out to be thousands of prints, over 100,000 negatives and “countless undeveloped rolls of film.”

Photo by Vivian Maier / Courtesy of Maloof Collection

So here’s a person’s life’s work (Maier is dead) that was amassed seemingly in a vacuum. She had no viewer save for herself and created this huge body of great stuff with presumably no audience. Essentially, she is a hobby photographer who’s work has been discovered and given a frame of reference and legitimacy because the person who found it recognized the mastery in her photography.

Photo by Vivian Maier / Courtesy of Maloof Collection

Since so little is known about Maier, the viewer tends to want to fill in the blanks about who she was via her photography. Was she a crazy loner who ran around snapping pictures of people while building a body of work that she thought was too good to share with the rest of us? Maybe. Was she so shy and old-fashioned that she never thought of her hobby of snapping pics as being capital A Art? Was she somewhere in between? Possibly. Or she could have been nothing like either of these scenarios or anywhere in the spectrum of humanity I’ve invented above.

Photo by Vivian Maier / Courtesy of Maloof Collection

We know she lived and must have loved taking pictures. I assume loved because of the quality of her work, but maybe she was just compelled to take pictures and did it without an emotional attachment. Again, all we have is the work to judge from. Work that is devoid of ego, myth and story. It’s all so fascinating because we discover about ourselves while we project ideas and concepts onto the work like we project personalities onto cats.

Photo by Vivian Maier / Courtesy of Maloof Collection

Adding another layer is the idea that this could be a hoax. Even if that were to come to light, somebody produced these photos and that person has talent. So if the hoax angle were real, doesn’t this still constitute great art because of the back story invented? In our post-post-post world, this wouldn’t take away from the work but add to it. Personally, I don’t see this being a hoax, but you never know. Does it matter if it is? I suppose it adds and takes away layers but either way it is still interesting and the photographs are really, really good.


http://vivianmaier.blogspot.com/