Comparing Notes

Vivian Maier, Thalia, c. 1959

An interesting thing happens when one feels compelled to collect all of the available monographs of a single artist’s work: the introductions and forewords tend to both overlap and contradict each other in equal measure. The authors of these notes typically focus on one aspect of the artist’s life or career; sometimes what is covered in the monograph itself, and other times a deep dive into their upbringing, earlier contributions to the medium, or their inspirations.

I own five monographs of Vivian Maier’s extensive body of work and have made a handful of posts on this blog showcasing my adoration of her photographic proclivities and style and the ways her work has inspired mine. However, it wasn’t until Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found by John Maloof (the storage unit buyer who now owns and is responsible for most of Maier’s body of work) came into my possession that I learned, through Marvin Heiferman’s illuminating text Lost, Then Found: The Life and Photographic Work of Vivian Maier that I understood her inspiration.

“I AM A CAMERA,” proclaims the marquee of the Thalia, a revival movie theater on New York City’s Upper West Side, in a photograph Maier made on a visit in 1959. Based upon the quantity of negatives and prints she was amassing, it’s likely Maier made that picture because in some ways she feels similarly. That desire to take in all there is to be seen in the world is not an uncommon one. “I become a transparent eyeball,” wrote an exhilarated Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature,” his 1836 essay on transcendentalism. “I am nothing; I see all.” More than a century later, Garry Winogrand would say something similar in explaining what drove his restless picture making: “I get totally out of myself. It’s the closest I come to not existing, I think, which is the best – which to me is attractive.”

Photography, for those who devote themselves to it, becomes a philosophical pursuit as much as a way of life. Looking for pictures is speculative and liberating, a compulsive activity that paradoxically sets you a distance apart from the world as you contemplate and do your best to connect with it. For photographers, that intense level of engagement is not only pleasurable but addictive. […] From the material she left behind, we get a sense of what she thought was worth taking note of.

Like Emerson, Winogrand, and likely Maier herself, that detached yet acutely observant state of being is one of the things I love most about being a photographer. Years of training my eyes to look for pictures, of orbiting other creatives who see differently than I do and learning from them, of maintaining a backlog of photographic history and its major players, have all coalesced into the fundamental DNA of my art. It's the entire basis of my #roaming project.