Would she have found a place and thrived? If rejected, would she have taken the judgment to heart and abandoned her photography altogether? It is hard not to conjecture, though, what turn her life and art might have taken if she had made an effort to enter the rarified precincts of the art world when she first began taking pictures.
Since then her reputation has grown (more books a documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier, premiered at the Toronto Film Festival this fall) and now this once anonymous woman with a Rollieflex strapped around her neck is increasingly regarded as a peer of masters like Gary Winogrand and Robert Frank. Two years ago the Howard Greenberg gallery presented a much-praised show of her street photography and many of these images were published in an book edited by Maloof. Intensely private, some people who knew her were surprised to learn she took pictures.
In 2007 Chicago photographer and historic preservationist John Maloof purchased a box of Maier’s negatives at auction, and this led him to discover the rest of her sizable cache of images. When she died in 2009 at the age of eighty-three, she left behind well over a hundred thousand photographic negatives (of which she had printed a small number), evidence of decades spent wandering the streets of her hometown, as well as others cities and locales around the world. Vivian Maier spent some forty years working as a nanny in Chicago. Their success is typically posthumous, which, as success goes, may be good for us less good for them. The support and benefits that might follow in the wake of a successful first show by a recent MFA graduate was never theirs. But, of course, “outsiders” live up to their name. This evidence may be tonic, especially within the context of the current art scene in which pricey educational credentials and the connections that follow seem all but essential to gaining recognition.
Dellshau, and William Hawkins, to name just a few artists who have come to prominence recently, certainly do attest to the pervasiveness of the visionary impulse across class and racial lines. Bodies of work by Martín Ramirez, Henry Darger, Charles A. The notion that great art is being made unbeknownst to the powers-that-be by hospital patients, truck drivers, janitors, and neighborhood loners satisfies our wish to believe in a fully democratized community of artistic expression. The discovery of the so-called “undiscovered genius” is the driving narrative behind the boom in what’s come to be called outsider art over the past few decades. Vivian Maier, “Untitled” (1959), (all images © Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery)
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