Seen and unseen

[slideshow_deploy id=’29020′]

Invisible may no longer be an adjective suitable to describe a photographer who has recently been the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, and yet it is the first that comes to mind when viewing Vivian Maier’s photographs. With her Rolleiflex medium-format camera slung low down to her belly, she worked, as she said, like a spy in New York and Chicago of the 1950s and ‘60s.

Her peculiar sympathies, sharp eye, wit and discretion produced a series of images that range from the type of candid street photographs popularised in the ‘70s to lovingly detailed prints where every pore and wrinkle of elderly men on the corner attain the sort of luminosity more often associated with portraits of some medieval saint.

While it is possible to savour the perfect pitch Maier’s street photography attains, somewhere between the hard-boiled asphalt jungle of Weegee in the 1940s and the Nixon-era grotesquerie of Diane Arbus, there is one wall of self-portraits here that points beyond and towards the equally astonishing history of why this show is even taking place at all. Here, Maier captures herself in a series of distorting surfaces, from weirdly angled mirrors embedded in cigarette machines to the giant plate-glass windows of Midtown Manhattan, where her sprightly face and figure mingles, translucent, among the dapperly attired mannequins.

VM SS 6

Installation images from Vivian Maier: Street Photographer at Willy-Brandt-Haus: Ruvi Simmons

 

She appears, she fades into the crowd, returning to the nanny jobs she held throughout her life and which provided her with the living quarters in which she amassed her thousands of rolls of negatives, some hastily processed in secret, in the bathroom, most left undisturbed. Acquaintances speak of how she wore her camera constantly, at work, at home, and of course in the street, hanging like a necklace around her neck – or, more precisely, an extension of her own body. And yet few if any knew the scope or content of her work. In 2007, as the documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, recounts, they went up for auction and were bought en masse by John Maloof. He would eventually co-direct the film, but first he went through the painstaking process of piecing together the life of a complete stranger who never sought to publish her work and who died in 2009 as “that nice old lady who lived down the way”, shuffling to and from the park and offering no hint at the thousands of works left to confer with the silence in the lock-up garage she rented in Chicago.

It must have felt like awakening the dead to first develop and print these photographs taken by an unknown lady from half a century before. The low point of view afforded by her Rolleiflex frequently surprises her subjects, who look down as if a child has just tugged at the hem of their jacket. Elsewhere, drunks on the Bowery mug for the cameras, suggesting the ease with which Maier could move from one environment to another (one of the children she once looked after recounts, in the film, how she would take them on long walks through the seediest streets of the Lower East Side, completely at ease, in search of subjects).

VM SS3

Installation images from Vivian Maier: Street Photographer at Willy-Brandt-Haus: Ruvi Simmons

It is not simply her selection of subjects, however; what places Maier among the very finest street photographers is her access to that mixture of serendipity and decisiveness, that ability to capture the perfect moment. Not just who, but when.

By Maier’s death in 2009, Maloof had begun to sift the contents of her storage unit; the collection of a lifetime. Because aside from photography, Maier was an avid collector of just about any and everything: train tickets, receipts, newspapers, clothing (she wore, almost exclusively, men’s shirts). All would be kept for that ever-promised time in the future when they would be useful, would shed some light on an image, inspire a photograph, give touch and taste to the real. All artists know this urge, and yet it would appear that Vivian Maier had no ambitions whatsoever to be an artist herself – at least not one who performs for the public to weigh-up and judge.

Later works, in colour, reveal that she did not stop evolving, and also that she was able to master the demands of a very different photographic challenge. The current exhibition additionally contains some experiments with super-8mm film. No home movies here, but rather extensions of the world as she knew it and revealed in her earliest photos.

And what world, exactly, would that be? Even after Maloof’s researches, the exhibition at Chicago Cultural Center that commenced an outpouring of interest around the world, the documentary with its interviews of those who knew her as their nanny and others who knew her more recently as their elderly friend, her intentions remain expressed purely through the photographs themselves. In them, whether it be Chicago or New York, the 20th century city comes to life as a whorl of momentary complements and contradictions, a plaintive and pathetic yet beautiful and funny, forever shifting zone of discovery.

VM5

Installation images from Vivian Maier: Street Photographer at Willy-Brandt-Haus: Ruvi Simmons

Vivian Maier may have described herself as a spy and been correct in that few, if any, knew what she really did and who she really was. Like spies, she also gathered information, leading her double life out in the open, her man’s shirt under a lady’s two-piece, her real existence as a photographer beneath her nannying obligations. She even had a habit of slightly changing her name – Vivienne Mayer, Vivien Mayer, etc. – with each new place of employment. And yet she was not really a spy because they pass on what they see without comment.

In these photographs, she is commenting all of the time. You can imagine her, looking down into the camera, and laughing at what she saw. The thrill of that moment when you release the shutter and commit a vision to a memory that will not fade away or be forgotten. The documentary may have been called Finding Vivian Maier, but in that sense she was never lost: she is everywhere in these photographs, and in the magical moments of the cities that they memorialise.

The thrill of that moment when you release the shutter and commit a vision to a memory that will not fade away or be forgotten. The documentary may have been called Finding Vivian Maier, but in that sense she was never lost: she is everywhere in these photographs, and in the magical moments of the cities that they memorialise.

VM SS1

Installation images from Vivian Maier: Street Photographer at Willy-Brandt-Haus: Ruvi Simmons

by Ruvi Simmons

Installation images from Vivian Maier: Street Photographer at Willy-Brandt-Haus: Ruvi Simmons

The exhibition Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is on at Willy-Brandt-Haus,  Wilhelmstrasse 140, 10963 Berlin.
until April 12, 2015
Entrance free. Tuesday-Friday 12-6pm,  Saturday and Sunday 12-8pm