In this week’s issue, Anthony Lane reviews “Finding Vivian Maier,” a documentary by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel. I first saw Vivian Maier’s photographs in 2011, at the Howard Greenberg Gallery, and was immediately inspired by the story behind the work: Maier, a nanny in Chicago who took photographs as a hobby, became one of America’s most admired street photographers after her death, in 2009. Though she was unknown as a photographer during her lifetime, her work found posthumous fame, thanks in large part to Maloof, a real-estate agent who discovered her work while researching images for a book. Maloof bid on a box of negatives at a thrift auction in 2007, without knowing anything about the photographer. The negatives, which showed Chicago in the nineteen-sixties, didn’t prove useful for his book, but they prompted Maloof to research Maier, to reconstruct her photographic archive, and, eventually, to exhibit her work at prominent galleries. Lane writes, “Near the start of the film, Maloof himself asks, ‘Why is a nanny’—he pauses for a brief laugh—‘taking all these photos?’ To which the only possible reply should be: Why not?” I suspect that Maier’s story led me to love her work more—especially her photographs of women on the street. I like imagining these women as sharing something with Maier herself: a passion, a talent, a secret skill that stands waiting to be revealed.
All photographs © Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection/Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery.
