Vivian Maier Tribute, Part III

[1]

INNER-ENVIRONS OF THE STREET PHOTOGRAPHER

Susan Sontag relates the shifts in perception concerning the role of the photographer in the early part of the 20th century, stating, “By the 1920s the photographer had become a modern hero, like the aviator and the anthropologist—without necessarily having to leave home.”[2] Yet the street photographer of the 1950s and 1960s is a more complex beast—not quite moral arbiter or social advocate or photojournalist—rather the street photographer owned a personality planted firmly in the murk of ambiguity.

Julien Levy characterized seminal street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s work as “amoral photography, equivocal, ambivalent, anti-plastic, accidental photography.”[3]

We can appreciate, in this sense, Maier’s tenderness and empathy evident in her portraits of children and minorities,

and at the same time her somewhat menacing, voyeuristic presence, as the encroaching shadow of her hat confronts a sleeping sunbather in rollers on a beach towel, for example.

Or the craggy lady in cat-eye glasses, face aghast at Maier’s brazen documentation, with Diary of a Housewife emblazoned on the placard behind her.

This and other images of Maier’s photo subjects jolted into the self-awareness that they are in fact photographic subjects seem reminiscent of the obviously irritated expressions of the couple on the hill in Robert Frank’s iconic photograph San Francisco, 1956:

Frank remarked on this photograph—his “favorite photograph of all”—“It is an invasion of people in their private lives and they were just looking at the view. So was I.”[4]

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

Conversation between Colin Westerbeck, associate curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and Joel Meyerowitz, master street photographer:

Westerbeck: Winogrand seemed to be happiest when he confronted a wall of humanity surging down the street. He threw himself into it.

Meyerowitz: Yes! It’s like going into the sea and letting the waves break over you. You feel the power of the sea. On the street each successive wave brings a whole new cast of characters. You take wave after wave. You bathe in it…[5]

Joel Meyerowitz

The nature of street photography, with its emphasis on informality, speed, randomness and anonymity perhaps created an open invitation for the fleetingness and anonymity of street photographers themselves. Eloquently stated by Colin Westerbeck, “The evanescence of the image might be thought of as reflecting the anonymity of the photographer himself.”[6]

Clive Scott remarks that the “staccato, jotted style” of the street photograph reflects the very walking patterns of street life.[7] Not only did Maier learn English from the movies; it also seems fitting that Maier, with her abiding love for the cinema, produced street photography specifically—its blurs, speed, repetition and serial images are so much a part of the movie aesthetic.

THE EVOLUTION OF STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

Cinema further influences contemporary photographers such as Jeff Wall. In an interview with Els Barents, Wall discusses cinema as a “performing picture”, commenting, “I think that cinematography is aesthetically more developed than the more spontaneous photographic aesthetic, the one identified with Cartier-Bresson, for example. The reliance on immediate spontaneity thins out the image, reduces the level at which the permanent dialectic between essence and appearance operates in it.”[8] One can witness Wall’s staged “decisive moment” in works such as Mimic and Milk.

Jeff Wall, Milk

Michael Fried cites two other artists who have envisioned again the medium of street photography—Beat Streuli

Beat Streuli, Bruxelles Midi

and Philip-Lorca diCorcia, who implemented a novel use of flashlights and camera/radio signals on the street to highlight certain passersby—his own sort of “theatrical lighting.”[9]

Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Los Angeles

* * * *

Please visit our blog site again soon; next week, I will feature an interview with John Maloof, the marvelous excavator of the Maier treasure trove!

* * * *

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for a verbal evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Researched and written by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601

(312) 814-8510

Foot notes/Works cited:

Brougher, Kerry. Jeff Wall. Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997.

Ferguson, Russell. Open City: Street Photographs Since 1950, New York: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2001.

Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Meyerowitz, Joel and Westerbeck, Colin. Bystanders: A History of Street Photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Scott, Clive. Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007.

Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1973, 89-90.

John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2009/03/robert_frank_speaks_part_two.html

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[1] All Vivian Maier images from John Maloof’s blog http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

[2] Sontag, Susan. On Photography. New York: The Noonday Press, 1973, 89-90.

[3] Ferguson, Russell. Open City: Street Photographs Since 1950, New York: Hatje Cantz Publishers, 2001, 10.

[4] http://www.artsjournal.com/man/2009/03/robert_frank_speaks_part_two.html

[5] Meyerowitz, Joel and Westerbeck, Colin. Bystanders: A History of Street Photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994. Preface, conversation.

[6] Meyerowitz 35.

[7] Scott, Clive. Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 3.

[8] Brougher, Kerry. Jeff Wall. Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, 1997, 35-6.

[9] Fried, Michael. Why Photography Matters As Art As Never Before. New Haven: Yale University Press, 252-254.

Vivian Maier Tribute, Part II

“LIFE IN THE QUICK”

There is a register of simple beauty and jubilation in many of the photographs of Vivian Maier—a woman’s head flung back in all-consuming laughter [1];

two gentlemen in bow ties head towards a light flirtation with a pretty lady near a cigar stand;

two older twin ladies turn away from one another with identical hands raised in a sort of double-personal declaration;

rows of daisies and rows of ladies with their hats.

We sense her gentle ironies and tensions—the young man on the motorcycle stalled as an aged lady swings her walker forward to make her way across an intersection.

Yet a thread of disconcerting complexity tempered with aesthetic magnificence runs through most of her work—the mother with the cigarette menacingly close to the boy’s crying face.

There’s a film noir quality to her heady juxtaposition of light and shadow, as in the two figures mysteriously pressed behind Venetian blinds,

or the glorious shots of rather monstrous, “confrontational” Chicago buildings.

As a body of work, we encounter “life in the quick”[2] in Chicago’s 1950s and 1960s; ladies with their stoles and ornate hats, heels and corsaged collie,

Midnight Cowboy decorates the movie placard, “men must change or die” spray-painted on a mailbox,

the uncanny juxtaposition of human sentiment and environmental decay—the laughing woman tragically foregrounding a demolition scene,

tensions between the encroaching city and the old ways of life—the hints of the primitive natural kingdom—vagabonds with their rubbish and grins, a man hovers near timber-like, rotted heap of materials,

a child pokes at a fire on the city street.

There is a sense of primitive wildness in the edges of human activity that we perhaps don’t see so blatantly anymore in the city proper.

One senses a strange spiritual energy in her work at times—a mother clasps her coat against an ominous prairie wind as she pushes a stroller filled with hay, while the displaced child walks seriously alongside, and two mysterious black spheres drift in the sky.

Top-notch portraiture of descendents clinging to one of the ancients.

STRANGERS TO MAIER, NEVERTHELESS HER ARTISTIC “ACCOMPLICES” ON THE STREET

Maier’s photographs are masterful, poetic, and feel already like classics; it’s as if a seminal book, for half a century lost, has returned to its proper place on the shelf alongside its rightful companions. It seems Maier’s work has been in a private conversation all these years with Henri Cartier-Bresson’s visual symphonies of movement:

Brassai’s seductive wedding of light and dark:

The slack and grave expressions in many of Walker Evans’ subway portraits:

Robert Frank’s alienated Americans,

Garry Winogrand’s sharp, glorious energies:

And William Eggleston’s foreboding sense of the ordinary:

Maier seemed to absorb the ethos of the so-called “Chicago School”[3], perhaps magically influenced by the masterful works of Barbara Crane:

and Ray Metzker.

She imbibed the spirit of the Institute of Design without actually attending the school, perhaps because shadows and light were democratically available for all to witness; in the words of Westerbeck:

“The flatness of the prairie to the west is just a mirror image of the flatness of the lake to the east; between the two, the city is perfectly cross-ventilated with light of an incomparable clarity and forcefulness, which is what the street photography of the Chicago School is really documenting.”[4]

* * * *

Please visit our blog site again soon; next week, I will feature an interview with John Maloof, the marvelous excavator of this Maier treasure trove!

The staff at MIR Appraisal Services, Inc. seeks to fully understand the arts in their particular cultural contexts and to analyze relationships between various artistic mediums and genres; in this way we can broaden our expertise as art appraisers. We are located just steps from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Chicago Cultural Center; please do give us a ring to set up an appointment for an evaluation of your most prized works of art.

Researched and written by Jessica Savitz

MIR Appraisal Services, Inc.

Principal Appraiser: Farhad Radfar, ISA AM

307 N. Michigan Avenue, Suite 308

Chicago, IL 60601

(312) 814-8510

Foot notes/Works Cited:

Meyerowitz, Joel and Westerbeck, Colin. Bystanders: A History of Street Photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994.

Scott, Clive. Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 3.

John Maloof, from his blog: http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

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[1] All images of Maier’s work from John Maloof’s blog, http://www.vivianmaier.blogspot.com/

[2] Scott, Clive. Street Photography from Atget to Cartier-Bresson. New York: I.B. Tauris, 2007, 3.

[3] Meyerowitz, Joel and Westerbeck, Colin. Bystanders: A History of Street Photography. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 1994, 365.

[4] Ibid 372.