Vivian Maier by Colin Westerbeck

Author:Colin Westerbeck
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-09-06T16:00:00+00:00

Because her visibility when face-to-face with subjects limited the sort of photograph she could make, she developed the ability to make a revealing picture even, or perhaps especially, when her subjects were turned away from her. If she had a favorite subject she liked to sneak up on from behind, it was hairdos (see here). Another subject indicative of the comic mischief Maier could get up to in photographs made behind the subject’s back is one of a workman rummaging in the back of a van so cluttered it creates the illusion he may have skewered himself on the business end of the long screwdriver that has poked a hole in his hip pocket (see here). It’s a sight gag. That screwdriver seems to exemplify literally what Barthes meant by the term punctum.

As entertaining as such photographs may be, Maier also had an eye for more evocative, ambiguous subjects, like the image above. On the one hand, there’s something comical about the way the woman seems about to impale herself on the fire hydrant. On the other hand, the image is soulful: an elderly woman is burdened by the shopping bags she carries and her need to rest for a moment. The lighting gives this photograph, made at dusk, its predominantly melancholy mood. Other photographs like this one from the late 1970s convey a similar feeling, of subjects weighed down with a symbolic poignancy, which was an emotion Maier herself was experiencing by then.

Yet another aspect of this photograph that gives it its power is the fact that in both shape and color, the woman and the fire hydrant match each other. It’s an amusing coincidence at first, but the more you look at the image, the more resonant it becomes. Though such pictures are most prominent in Maier’s late work of the 1970s and 1980s, earlier examples crop up, as well. In the following picture from 1966, for example, a young woman stares into a trash can. Her posture—her attitude, as revealed in the way she addresses the trash can—mimics the can’s battered shape, as she crosses her legs and bows her head. She and the trash can are performing a little pas de deux. This sort of formalism, through which the shapes in a photograph coincide or interlock to enrich the image’s power, is a quality of certain works by Maier that break free of the aesthetic that predominates in an Arbus or Frank image.

Location unknown, June 1966.

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