Eye to Eye: Photographs by Vivian Maier 0991541804, 9780991541805

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Written and edited by Richard Cahan and Michael W illiams

Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/eyetoeyephotogra0000maie

EYE EYE

Im nobody! Who are you? Are you nobody, too? Then theres a pair ofus—dont tell! Theyd banish us, you know.

How dreary to be somebody! How public, like a frog To tell your name the livelong day To an admiring bog!

Each ofthese photographs is the product of achance encounter. Vivian Maier, camera in hand, encounters someone walking toward her—or perhaps lingering in a doorway. Something about the person catches her eye. They pause,

though barely. In each picture they meet eye to eye. Life is a perpetual parade. Around every corner is somebody new. If we notice.

Since her death in 2009, Vivian Maier has become a photographic darling. Her story—thousands ofphoto negatives and prints found in a storage locker and sold for pennies at auction—has attracted the attention of millions around the world, and she has been celebrated posthumously as one of the world’s great street photographers. Unknown as a photographer during her long life, Maier was a private woman who now speaks powerfully through photographs she took only for herself. Maier, who worked as a nanny in Chicago's northern suburbs for much ofher life, remains an enigma. She left more than 100,000 negatives and photographs, but few written clues to those images or herself. We know what she saw, but we don’t know what she thought. She is often described as a photo-voyeur, working in a clandestine manner to capture authentic moments. She is cast as a quirky, anti-social character,

operating in the margins and eschewing real connections. But these photographs show something more. collected here, and so many others, Maier had subjects. She clearly made her presence known disarm and charm them, to slow or stop them.

To make the spontaneous portraits to place herself firmly in view ofher to them, and was apparently able to For just an instant.

These are people immersed in their own lives: sitting on a stoop, waiting for a bus, returning from the market, cuddling at a picnic. These are not formal portraits—in the studio with lights. They are portrayals of people going about their business. The pictures are innocent and direct. It is these split-second relationships that mark this work and catch our breath. Usually, she needed just one shot.

Maier, the domestic, knew just how close she could get, how to be present and yet not. Hyper-focused, sensitive to nuance, and acutely aware of human emotion, she created sharp, precise images as people wandered in and out of her viewfinder—some curious, some confused, some friendly, some dismissive. A photographer walks a fine line, seeking permission to take a photograph on one hand and being in danger ofintruding on the other. Do not underestimate the courage that went into these portraits. It’s much easier to let people walk on by than to stop them. Like other street photographers, she was on the prowl for metaphor, outrageous juxtaposition, and humor. Like others, she could make herself invisible in search of the moment when the scattered elements in the frame resolve. But by making eye contact, Maier broke a common rule of documentary work.

The intimacy of the photographs adds dimension to our understanding of Maier herself and yet deepens the mystery surrounding her. How was she able to connect with so many thousands ofstrangers? Photographer and critic Allan Sekula, one of the first to recognize Maier’s brilliance when her photographs appeared online, said she apparently had “a charmed presence” that encouraged the people she observed to continue behaving naturally. “She had this ability to be there without signaling threat or invasion,’ Sekula said, “to be

accepted or at the very least tolerated and ignored.”

Some suppose that Maier’s choice of equipment may have helped make these pictures possible because she could peer down into the viewfinder ofher waist-high camera

instead of making eye contact. But in these pictures the subjects are looking directly into Maier’s eyes. On almost every roll of film, Maier produced at least one eye-to-eye photo. Roll after roll, year after year. In a park, at a carnival, or along a mountainside. It is the one constant of her work. Ofcourse, some ofher subjects gave her just a parting look. A boy in rural France glances up at Maier as his mother works on her sewing. A girl carried on her mother’s shoulder peeks back. A man in Chicago barely notices Maier as his wife readies a stroller. These pictures were grabbed; they could not be created any other way. The photographs in this book were made beginning around 1952, the year Maier bought her first serious camera, a Rolleiflex. The earliest photos were taken in New York City, where she was born in 1926 and lived on and off until moving to Chicago in the mid-1950s. And many were taken in France, where she spent much ofher early childhood and where she returned at least twice as an adult. In 1959, Maier took a sweeping world tour, visiting the Philippines, Taiwan, Hong

Kong and Macau, Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, India, Yemen, Egypt, Italy, and France. Carrying the medium-format Rolleiflex and a tiny Robot camera, which produced small, square negatives using 35-millimeter film, Maier photographed persistently. Most of the French photographs were made in the Champsaur Valley of the southern French Alps, her ancestral home. She also took other trips throughout the United States, Canada, the Caribbean, and South America. People who knew Vivian Maier said she had trouble making and keeping friends. In the French village of Saint-Bonnet and in the Chicago suburbs, many viewed her

as an oddity—eccentric, peculiar, out ofstep. They recall a woman striding through town, resolute and relentless, with one or more cameras hanging from her neck.

They had no idea what she was up to. She seems to have led a parallel existence to those she lived among. New Yorkers in ragged shirts gaze down at Maier and her camera; French men and women look up at the woman they described as the blond with a camera. They called her “the American” in France, and “Frenchy” in the United States. And yet, she was able to connect, if only for the span of a shutter stop. Despite her solitary lifestyle, Maier’s photographs reveal her compulsion to explore and see who might be around the next corner. Maier loved excursions. Her charges in the Chicago suburbs, now grown adults, tell tales about how “Miss Maier” would take them on adventures by bus and train all over the city. “Don’t tell your parents where we went,’ she would admonish them. Now we get to tag along. All of the photographs included here are from theJeffrey Goldstein Collection, about 16,000 negatives from the original 2007 Chicago storage locker sale of Maier’s

belongings. Bought later that year at an auction house and later resold, the work in this collection dates from 1949, when Maier traveled to France with a box camera she loved, and continues through the mid-1970s. In America, she took pictures on her

days off, Sundays and Thursdays. She set out without a specific plan, just the need to see and record. These pictures—most in perfect focus, skillfully lighted and using acrobatic

composition—have never been published. They introduce us to a woman ofdeep contradictions: eager to meet people but unable to go further, affectionate toward children, compassionate to eccentrics and people on the fringe. This is her family.

Maier is the most unlikely oftrailblazers. Today, we all live in an Instagram age. Technology has allowed us to document our lives and surroundings as exhaustively

as she did and easily share our daily visual moments. But sharing seems to have been the last thing on her mind. Whatever her intentions, she left thousands of rolls

unprocessed and printed only a small fraction of frames.

Maier carried her cameras until late in life. By her eighties, however, she was often

seen sitting alone on a park bench just off the Lake Michigan shore. Sitting without a camera. © You've got such an interesting face,” she told a neighbor, who knew nothing of Maier’s life as a photographer and saw her as something of an outsider. Maier was still watching.

This is a book about the spontaneity oflife. The delight that comes next. What will you see? Who will you encounter? And this is a book about bonds. Between people. Passing. Looking. Curious. A moment between nobodies. Humanity. “Then there’s a pair of us,’ Emily Dickinson wrote. “Don’t tell!” Vivian Maier never did.

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This is our second journey through the negatives left behind by Vivian Maier that comprise the Jeffrey Goldstein Collection. In our first journey, in 2011, we put together the book Vivian Maier: Out ofthe Shadows. Now we have been given a second chance, and the trip has been just as thrilling. Once again, we thank Vivian Maier. She teaches us, and those who see her work, every day. We often wonder how one person could have made so many powerful images.

And once again, we have received remarkable support. Jeffrey Goldstein and Lisa Vogel, owners of the collection, have given us carte blanche in selecting the work. They believe in the power of shared art and the value of books. Anne Zakaras, collection coordinator, offered us insight and encouragement. We have also been assisted by Ron Gordon and Sandy Steinbrecher, master printers of Maier’s work;

Frank Jacowiak, the collection’s photo consultant, and Jessica Goldstein. As in our first book, we have attempted to be as faithful as possible to the work. All the photographs were scanned directly from Maier’s negatives. They have not been cropped or manipulated. We hope she would be pleased by the results.

The captions are basic because not much more is known about these specific pictures. Researcher Dorr St. Clair helped us identify locations in the Chicago-area

photographs. Philippe Escallier, Jean-Marie Millon, and Monique Escallier aided our knowledge of Maier’s years in France by showing us exactly where she lived and introducing us to people who remember her. We fondly recall meeting Ferréol

(Youyou) Davin, the man pouring milk from a milk bucket. How he smiled after seeing the picture Maier took of him more than a half-century before!

One of the many joys of the project was in learning more about Vivian Maier. Since the publication ofour first book, we have met Nancy and Avron Ginsburg, who employed Maier as a nanny for about sixteen years; Curt and Linda Mathews, who hired Maier in the 1980s; Sally Reed, who saw Maier in the last years ofher life, and many who rubbed elbows with her. We also had a chance to revisit people who knew Vivian well: Inger Raymond, Richard Baylaender, and Bindy Bitterman. They all add valuable information, but no matter how many books and movies are made about her life, Vivian Maier will remain a mystery. No doubt she would have preferred that. We would also like to thank Gary Hawkey, ofiocolor, for producing the book,

and Richard Williams, of Small Press United, for selling it. Mark Jacob and Caleb Burroughs took a last look.

Once again, our most loving thanks go to our families—our wives Karen Burke and Cate Cahan, who make our lives sweet and CityFiles Press possible; our children and

grandchildren: Chris, Daisy, and Caedan Jinks; Claire, Aaron, and Glenn Cahan, as well as Elissa, Caleb, Maddie, and Millie Burroughs. They are our chance encounters.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, includingg photocopy, recording,g or any information or storage retrieval system, without permission of the publisher.

All photographs in this book are from the

Jeffrey Goldstein Collection Emily Dickinson’s poem “I’m nobody! Who are you?” was first published in Poems by Emily Dickinson: Second Series, edited by two of

her friends, T. W. Higginson and Mabel Loomis Todd. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1891. Written and edited

by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams Published by CityFiles Press, Chicago, Illinois cityhlespress.com Produced and designed by Michael Williams Print and color management by iocolor, LLP, Seattle, Washington Printed and bound in China

ISBN: 978-0-9915418-0-5 FIRST

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