[ed. See also: here and here.]
Sitting on the ground, the homeless man curls himself into an elegant spiral: knees raised, arms wrapped, head lowered so that nothing shows but the round top of his cloth cap. His light-colored suit and hat are dirty, but he wears good shoes, and there is a ring on his hand. Huddled on the sidewalk, he turns himself into his own protective shell; he draws himself inward, hiding, yet makes a shape that arrests the eye.
Still pictures are more secretive than moving pictures. The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved. A young black man dressed in white rides a dark horse bareback under the shadow of the El: the picture lingers in the mind like a cryptic poem. The street is empty, the horse walks calmly, and the boy sits on its back with easy grace.
Documentary films about photographers are caught between images that flow and images that freeze; talking heads unpack the significance of iconic images seen all too fleetingly. Still photography turns a fugitive glimpse into a permanent record that can be studied for any length of time. A beautiful woman with dark-rimmed eyes, seen from the window of a passing bus, becomes a monument as enduring as the marble front of the Public Library rising behind her. Film returns these images to the tyranny of time, giving them context at the price of their independence.
Finding Vivian Maier investigates the case of a provokingly secretive woman who took thousands of photographs but kept them locked away, never showing or selling them during her lifetime. The documentary features interviews with people who knew Maier, including those who employed her as a nanny or who as children were her charges. They construct a fascinating, contradictory, unsettling verbal portrait of the artist, complicating rather than simplifying our understanding of her. It seems she was conscious of being a puzzle, even gleefully so: one speaker quotes Maier calling herself “the mystery woman.”
Vivian Maier was a strange, difficult person, and those who knew her have spent a lot of time trying to understand her. But when people in the film say, “Why was a nanny taking all these photographs?” or “What’s the use of taking it if no one sees it?” they reveal less about Maier than about common assumptions of what art is for, and who artists are. Maier’s photographs, to which she devoted herself rigorously but for which she never sought recognition, illustrate the paradox of someone who wanted to stay hidden yet obsessively documented her existence, a solitary outsider who could form profound, fleeting connections with strangers. One interviewee speculates that Maier would have been upset at having her privacy violated by the documentary’s delving. But the film’s fascination with its subject, at once intrusive and compassionate, feels very much like Maier’s own eye, stalking people in the street, yet seeming not to expose them so much as to grant them the flattery of rapt attention.
by Imogen Sara Smith, Threepenny Review | Read more:
Image: Vivian Maier
Sitting on the ground, the homeless man curls himself into an elegant spiral: knees raised, arms wrapped, head lowered so that nothing shows but the round top of his cloth cap. His light-colored suit and hat are dirty, but he wears good shoes, and there is a ring on his hand. Huddled on the sidewalk, he turns himself into his own protective shell; he draws himself inward, hiding, yet makes a shape that arrests the eye.Still pictures are more secretive than moving pictures. The power of great photographs comes from the tension between what they reveal and what they withhold. Cut off from time before and after, they have the excitement of mysteries forever on the verge of being solved. A young black man dressed in white rides a dark horse bareback under the shadow of the El: the picture lingers in the mind like a cryptic poem. The street is empty, the horse walks calmly, and the boy sits on its back with easy grace.
Documentary films about photographers are caught between images that flow and images that freeze; talking heads unpack the significance of iconic images seen all too fleetingly. Still photography turns a fugitive glimpse into a permanent record that can be studied for any length of time. A beautiful woman with dark-rimmed eyes, seen from the window of a passing bus, becomes a monument as enduring as the marble front of the Public Library rising behind her. Film returns these images to the tyranny of time, giving them context at the price of their independence.
Finding Vivian Maier investigates the case of a provokingly secretive woman who took thousands of photographs but kept them locked away, never showing or selling them during her lifetime. The documentary features interviews with people who knew Maier, including those who employed her as a nanny or who as children were her charges. They construct a fascinating, contradictory, unsettling verbal portrait of the artist, complicating rather than simplifying our understanding of her. It seems she was conscious of being a puzzle, even gleefully so: one speaker quotes Maier calling herself “the mystery woman.”
Vivian Maier was a strange, difficult person, and those who knew her have spent a lot of time trying to understand her. But when people in the film say, “Why was a nanny taking all these photographs?” or “What’s the use of taking it if no one sees it?” they reveal less about Maier than about common assumptions of what art is for, and who artists are. Maier’s photographs, to which she devoted herself rigorously but for which she never sought recognition, illustrate the paradox of someone who wanted to stay hidden yet obsessively documented her existence, a solitary outsider who could form profound, fleeting connections with strangers. One interviewee speculates that Maier would have been upset at having her privacy violated by the documentary’s delving. But the film’s fascination with its subject, at once intrusive and compassionate, feels very much like Maier’s own eye, stalking people in the street, yet seeming not to expose them so much as to grant them the flattery of rapt attention.
by Imogen Sara Smith, Threepenny Review | Read more:
Image: Vivian Maier
