The long awaited Maloof film -- hes the guy who bought the trunk on auction at the storage facility where Vivian Maier had stashed her worldly possessions before she died, and found in it 100,000 negatives, and more than two thousand rolls of as yet undeveloped film, an entire lifes work of an unknown photographer who turned out to be one of the greats of the 20th century, unimaginable -- opens Friday, and contains much that has not before been seen. The creation of her story and the control of her images have become a secondary story of considerable interest; but people are still trying to bring to ground the idea of a photographer of her skills who never attempted to show her work professionally and indeed very rarely let anyone see it. That issue presents much to consider, about her almost heartbreaking solitude and about her sense of her autonomy, or agency, as a woman, as an immigrant, as a caretaker for children of the well to do. But I have seen nothing yet that addresses the particular technical issues that bound and define the work-experience of a photographer, especially a documentary-style street photographer using b/w film in the middle of the 20th century. You learn the camera, you learn the lenses, you learn the film(s), what they can do and what you must know they cannot do. You learn the very subtle techniques and chemical possibilities needed for the correct processing of your negatives (correct, that is, for your pictures, your vision) and of making rudimentary prints (fine print making is another art all together). And what you do with this set of skills, is place a frame around moments in time and freeze them. You might say that it becomes your job to reveal a rectilinear geometry underlying reality. It is not the work of a creative imagination -- some photography, and much current digital photography, surely is that, but the kind of photography practiced by Vivian Maier, is not that. To see whats there requires imagination but not of the fabulous kind; it is the skill of looking closely and using the equipment naturally or organically or integrally so that what you see and what you end up with on film are relatively close. Anyone, especially in the film era, who has gotten interested in taking pictures will know the the disappointment of confronting the final product and saying, that isnt what I saw, that isnt even close to what I wanted the picture to look like. Mastering photography is the attempt to, among other aims, eliminate that disappointment; as well as, on the front end, be able to point the camera at the exact right thing from the exact right distance and press the button at the exact right time. So you develop the film and create a positive image (generally in those days, contact sheets: hers were quite impressive in terms of success rate of the images, see the contact sheets pages at the Official VM website...) and there it is: you now have that moment in time; or, as one of the great French photographers -- Doisneau? Brassai? -- put it when asked why he shot what he shot, you now know what that thing looks like as a photograph. The artistic experience is complete. You dont really need others to see it -- or some do, but more than youd expect do not. Photography is an art that lends itself rather well to not needing to be shared. Performative arts must be shared; communicative arts (writing) have an implicit audience; visual arts slightly less so, though sculpture and painting and the like are the making of something from nothing and are intended at least to take up some space in the world. A photographic negative, a contact sheet or contact print? The complete experience of the creative act of a photographer? Not so much. What must have amounted to more than 125,000 images (think of going through the creative process Ive described so many thousands of times, seeing the thing you wanted to see, or not seeing it, seeing failure, so many thousands of times) and the entire business fit in a trunk and sold for $375. Maier was in a nursing home when all her stuff was sold for unpaid rent on her storage unit. She died in 2009, at 83, two years after Maloof discovered what was in the trunk. Within a year of that she had become an international sensation in the world of photography, but she went to her grave holding in her heart the perfect silence of a hundred thousand frozen moments in time, stilled, framed, and revealed by her.
Posted on: Mon, 24 Mar 2014 11:08:09 +0000
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