The story of Vivian Maier is probably one of the art world’s most compelling mysteries. A nanny by profession, she was an alarmingly talented and vastly prolific photographer whose keen eye for the mundane produced some of the 20th century’s most intriguing works of street photography. At times she was a Mary Poppins, trekking across a city like Chicago with a gaggle of children passing like ducklings behind her. At other times, she was Weegee, tuned into the pulse of urban centers, her lens drawn to crowds of celebrity, crime and everything squished in between.
The juxtaposition of being a lifelong caretaker in one moment, chasing kids and bickering with parents, and a relentless documentarian on the other, churning out rolls of film a day, is enigmatic in itself. But the real kick is that Vivian Maier is a name no one truly knew until about 2007. It was then that a former real estate agent named John Maloof unknowingly purchased a box of her photographic negatives for $400. Fast forward through a heavy dose of research and detective work, and you have “Finding Vivian Maier,” the Oscar-nominated film that recounts the life of a woman the art world reveres, but no one actually seems to know.
Vivian Maier self-portrait from John Maloof and Charlie Siskel’s FINDING VIVIAN MAIER. Credit Vivian Maier courtesy of the Maloof Collection.
Maloof worked with “Bowling for Columbine” filmmaker Charlie Siskel to create the documentary, a portrait of Maier, a woman of French ancestry who many met, but few understood, as countless interviews Maloof and Siskel conducted with the children she nannied and the mothers she encountered reveal. At best, and perhaps most plausibly, she was a devoted photographer who resorted to childcare in order to sustain her relentless love of art. At worst, according to more wild accounts of her life, she was a spy, dropped into the American hinterlands with a fake French accent and a penchant for hoarding newspapers and ephemera in the various homes she occupied throughout her largely nomadic life.
However, the film is as much a speculative glimpse into the psyche of a late photographic icon as it is the story of a local historical society president who simply got lucky and proceeded to make the very most of his good fortune. Maloof started a blog devoted to Maier’s work and staged her first (posthumous) gallery show, eventually identifying Maier’s closest — and contested — relative in order to attain the rights to Maier’s work. The documentary is just one piece of a massive campaign to bring Maier to the world’s attention. And while Maloof might not be the only collector vying to maintain Maier’s legacy, he’s certainly the most ardent.
Ahead of the 2015 Academy Awards ceremony, we chatted with Maloof and Siskel about the making of a Vivian Maier film and the fate of a woman photographer catapulted to fame without her consent.
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The documentary is as much about Vivian as it is about you, John, and your experience discovering a previously unknown artist. Was this an intentional part of the storytelling?
JM: When we first started to work on the structure of the film, it was up in the air, but it became an obvious way to go. To tell the two stories — my story of discovering Vivian’s life, and this detective journey. What better way to show the mystery than through me, who actually lived it? It is a documentary after all, so why not show it through the eyes of the person who experienced it? So we filmed it that way. I’m there with the subjects and I’m there in France.
CS: As a detective story, and as a mystery story, it helped to have a central character who is the detective. And not only was John doing this detective work, the viewer gets to feel as though they are making the discoveries alongside John. That’s certainly how I felt. I wasn’t there when he opened the first box of photos, or when he contacted the first family. But I got to feel that I was along for this roller coaster ride of discovery. And John then became an advocate for Vivian. He is not just looking to uncover the facts of Vivian’s life and learn about her story, he becomes an advocate her her work right from the beginning. He can be seen in the film sort of overwhelmed with the work ahead of him in this capacity. He needed help, and he reached out to various institutions but they didn’t respond in the way that he hoped. And we wanted to track that journey too — how he mounted Vivian’s first show in Chicago, and the way Vivian went from a complete unknown to one of the more recognizable figures in the photography word.
Was there any aspect of Vivian’s life you wish you would have been able to address in the film that just didn’t make the final cut?
JM: Short answer — no!
CS: Well, one thing that we didn’t end up figuring out was that Vivian, along with all of these sort of journalistic endeavors that she was doing, would take these Weegee-like crimes scene photographs at night. She was roaming the streets as if she’d had a police scanner, finding these crime scenes and shooting the rough areas of town. And she’s also show up at press conferences or parades, documenting the goings-on. One thing we found a lot of, and some of which has been displayed but didn’t make it into the film, was that she would show up at movie openings in the press scrum. She’d be in there taking pictures as if she were a stringer. Taking pictures of John Wayne, Lena Horne, Audrey Hepburn. There she is clicking away as if she’s a member of the press corps. But we just never ended up fitting it in.
