Photographer unknown, Hautes-Alpes, 1950 © The Estate of Vivian Maier The portrait of an iconoclast Without this insight, it is difficult to grasp the profound consequences and the origins of this unclassifiable personality. This is Vivian Maier’s heritage, a heritage that she would be running from all her life (to the point of falsifying her IDs). Marks’s patient, attentive book reveals the ins and outs of a family of French origin tragically divided between a dysfunctional mother, a romantic grandmother, a schizophrenic brother, and a resigned father. The life of the deceased woman is retraced in the form of a fresco. From all the clues and testimonies, she reconstituted a genealogy built on lies and family secrets. She questioned, identified, and reconstructed the story, the chronology, the places, and the protagonists. Was it for lack of financial means or was it folly? For Ann Marks, “there are no answers without questions.” After obtaining full access to the archives, she tackled Vivian Maier’s myth. Vivian Maier’s existence pushed the limits of the imagination: her whimsical, but strong headed personality comes across in the archives which she knowingly abandoned in an unpaid storage unit, triggering much speculation. What followed seems like a dream sequence. This body of work was unknown even to its author.
Born in 1926, Vivian Maier had spent her life photographing the world without ever promoting her work: of the 140,000 shots, only 5% were developed. Maloof sums up all the questions sparked by this unknown woman. This was a feat in itself, but the story had only just begun.
John Maloof recounts and reenacts his discovery in the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, which was nominated for an Oscar in 2015. The market went wild: experts, exhibitions, books… Everyone was in agreement about the find, even the New York Times spoke of “a new candidate for the pantheon of great 20th-century street photographers.” Yet Vivian Maier lived on in total anonymity, and it was only an obituary in 2009 announcing her death at age eighty-three, that gave a first clue to the buyer. This story began in 2007 with John Maloof, a twenty-five-year-old real-estate agent, who, at a blind auction, bought tens of thousands of Vivian Maier’s negatives, and quickly realized they had a lot of potential - especially when Allan Sekula bought a few prints and suggested that he should not post this work on Flickr. With Vivian Maier, “There are no answers without questions” Vivian Maier is the story of an autodidact: an unknown photographer who, unbeknownst to her, becomes a global phenomenon, and yet remains impossible to track even as the whole world is enthralled by her photographs. Vivian Maier, Chicago, 1970s © The Estate of Vivian Maier.
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