Mysterious street photographer's work may offer clues to her inner life

It may seem strange that Vivian Maier was so obsessed with self-portraits.

Just over a decade ago, no one knew who Vivian Maier was and very few had seen her work. Now, her images are widely celebrated around the world. But the mysterious street photographer behind them remains largely unknown and the little that has been pieced together about her life suggests she was a decidedly private person. In fact, she spent the last few years of her life as an impoverished recluse and died alone in a nursing home in 2009.

So why would such a person be obsessed with recording so many images of herself?

“Yes, she was very private,” says Anne Morin, curator of the exhibit Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands. “She never had relationships that were very well-developed. She was the daughter of immigrants. I really think she needed her relationship of the world to go through photography. She was invisible, she was from lower level of society. She didn’t have a house or a home. She was someone who probably wasn’t of interest to anyone and she probably didn’t have access to her own identity. I really think the fact that she took so many self-portraits of herself was, in a way, affirmation that she was at that time and that place. Each photograph is the witness that she was there. In a way, she needed to rebuild that identity that she never had access to.”

This is only speculation, of course. While the photographer left behind a mountain of work to offer hints into her psychological makeup, the reality is that few people paid enough attention to Maier when she was alive to develop any real concrete theories about why she did what she did or lived how she lived.

Still, Morin is as good an authority as any to speculate. As early as 2011, she has been instrumental in introducing Maier’s work to the masses by curating shows throughout Europe and North America. That includes Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands, a travelling exhibit that lands at Calgary’s Glenbow Museum for its Canadian debut on Feb. 8 in conjunction with the Exposure Photography Festival.

The broad strokes of the photographer’s biography were revealed in the Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier, an engrossing film by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel that chronicled the photographer’s stranger-than-fiction rise from complete unknown to posthumous art-world sensation. She left behind a good deal of material to speculate from, amassing 100,000 negatives and 8 MM films that were left in a storage locker she could no longer afford to keep. It proved to be a treasure trove that was unknown to the world until Maloof unearthed it at a local auction house in Chicago in 2007. The more than 100 photographs displayed at the Glenbow exhibit all came from undeveloped rolls, which means they were images that the artist herself would have never seen. Based in Chicago and New York, Maier earned a modest living as a nanny but operated more or less in secret as a photographer, snapping thousands upon thousands of images — albeit rarely more than one frame of each — as she travelled through the city streets with her young charges. While she took streetscapes and skyscrapers, much of her work involved capturing the day-to-day life of people in the city in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s. While In Her Hands does include an image of Kirk Douglas arriving at the New York premiere of Spartacus, most of the people she chronicles were not movie stars. They were children, women, the elderly and the working class. Given that she was also obsessed with images of herself, it’s not much of a stretch to assume Maier felt a certain kinship with her vulnerable subjects.

“I don’t think there is any other photographer in the history of photography who has developed such interesting work as a way of representing (him or herself),” Morin says.

“Then with the street scenes, which is the main theatre where Vivian Maier takes photographs, what is interesting is the narration, the little stories that she is taking photographs of and revealing very interesting details: some heads, a hat, the way somebody is dressed or look. You have many portraits in these streets that are of people that were like her: invisible people and people we don’t take care of, people we are not interested in and people who are outside the world. In taking pictures of them, she is giving them the faculty to get into history. In a way, she is taking on a role as an anthropologist.”

Since Maier’s work was accidentally discovered just over a decade ago, she has become a posthumous celebrity and subject of study, with numerous books and exhibits centred on her work in the past decade.

“In a way, it’s beautiful that this woman who never existed and never ended her life properly, we are giving her a beautiful life after her death,” Morin says. “So many people project themselves onto her. That’s why she is getting so powerful right now. She has a huge visibility.”

Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands opens Feb. 8 and runs until May 24.

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