Keeping the Negative: On Ann Marks’ “Vivian Maier Developed”
Ann Marks | Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny | Atria Books | 2021 | 368 Pages
If I write that Vivian Maier was a photographer, you'll misunderstand. You will think of framed prints and public exhibits. Maybe you will think of faux-leather-bound books with 4x6 snapshots pasted into place. Vivian's medium, however, was the negative. At the time of her death, Vivian had cached over 100,000 photo negatives in storage spaces and living quarters. The vast majority never made it into hold-in-your-hand form or gaze-across-the-gallery size. A great number were left as undeveloped frames. They were small, inverted compressions of gelatinous potentiality. Ann Marks' 2021 biography of Vivian Maier, titled Vivian Maier Developed, attempts to render a reversed image of the photographer's work—one which fits into our world. Something made the exposure of film to light unbearably good for Vivian, and Vivian Maier Developed attempts to find the source of this feeling.
The first few chapters of Vivian Maier Developed follow Vivian's ancestors in France and Germany to establish the familial conditions into which Vivian was born. Marks uses this history in a way which sometimes verges on determinism. She writes that the decisions made by Vivian's grandfather "would set into motion three generations of family dysfunction, the nature of which provides the key to unlocking the story of Vivian Maier." It's undeniable Vivian's family had troubles: her parents were divorced, with her father absent and her mother known for being impulsive and unreliable. Her brother struggled with drug addiction, was dishonorably discharged from the military, and was hospitalized for schizophrenia. Marks does not contextualize these troubles within historical trends, however, and so it is difficult to know how uncommon this was among first- and second-generation Americans of the time. Likewise, Marks speculates on the household conditions Vivian endured in childhood, writing, “Perhaps Vivian was the one delegated to do cooking, cleaning, and laundry, given her mother's aversion to housework.” This isn't an unreasonable guess given the labor boys and girls were expected to do in the 20th century. However, Marks treats these conditions as the origin point for an individual pathology rather than a social position Vivian shared with millions. Though Marks does not contextualize Vivian’s childhood for us, she does turn to science as a tool for legitimating her explanation of Vivian’s behavior and artistic practice. For instance, Marks draws on the opinions of Dr. Donna Mahoney–a practicing psychologist at Northwestern University who did not meet the family–to suggest that Vivian's mother, Marie, may have suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder—a serious claim to level about someone we can only know through the recollections of others. We could infer from this distanced diagnosis that Marie’s illness had a profound impact on Vivian, but Marks does not make a precise argument regarding the links between family history, mental illness, childhood conditions, and adult life.
Vivian is described by Marks as something of an auto-didact and self-starter who, largely ignored by the adults in her life, gets down to the business of learning and working. At fourteen, Vivian re-taught herself English (after spending several years in France with her mother), and by seventeen was working in a doll factory. Then, as a young adult in the early 1950s, Vivian took her first known photographs, using a simple box camera, while visiting rural France.
But stop there and ask yourself: Why? Why does this person, a neglected child from “narcissistic” and distant parents, who was treated “as if she were wallpaper” pick up the camera? Why does this become the object through which she sees and transforms the world into an image? It can't be incidental that Vivian's first photographs were taken in the early years of her forcefully independent adult life, in the village where her mother, Marie, was known as the only woman who owned a camera. In this return to the country of her mother's birth, Vivian finds her life work—the creation of photographic images—within her mother's own social image as the sole operator of a camera. Vivian took thousands of photographs during this trip. Given how few of those would ever make it from negative to print, it's not unreasonable to ask what part of the pre-print photographic act—loading the film, framing the subject, looking through the camera, pressing the shutter release, developing the film, viewing the negatives, storing the negatives—initiated this mass of images and kept Vivian's attention for decades. In later chapters, Marks details Vivian's habits as a hoarder of newspapers and other objects, and so it would make sense that she had a love of keeping photographs. Yet, one does not have to take photographs to hoard them.
Upon Vivian's return to New York City, she continued to take photographs. She tracked down celebrities, posed neighbors, and captured candids of her charges as nanny. Soon, Vivian moved from the box camera to a Rolleiflex—a camera notable because the operator holds it waist-high, looking down into the viewfinder at their subject, rather than at eye-level (it's like looking into a puddle from an angle and seeing the person across from you). Among her images were people in the midst of arrest, passed out drunk on park benches, or otherwise at a limit of society's tolerances. Marks addresses these images as “authentic” and argues that Vivian was oblivious to the scorn her subjects directed towards her in these invasive moments. Likewise, portraits of Vivian's neighbors are—in the recollections of the subjects—described as exacting depictions of the inner qualities of each person. Marks positions the camera as a device capable of highlighting the truth, and interprets Vivian's photographs as her evidence. While it’s true that Vivian’s work included a wide range of candid snaps of strangers, those snaps do not form an objective, authentic image of a subject. Instead, the histories of camera development and marketing, the aesthetic tropes of framing and contrast, and the social codes which permitted Vivian—a white woman in the mid-century—to wander rather freely through public spaces, are all drawn through the lens and into the image. Vivian also photographed celebrities on the street, and well-posed acquaintances on rooftops and at their places of work. Artifice was present at least as much as ‘authenticity.’
At times, the strength of Vivian's will and desire for independence troubled her employers. Vivian’s employers play a central role in Marks’ project, serving as measures of time and critical pivots. During a cross-country excursion, Vivian ditched the family that employed her. She disappeared without warning or explanation. Recounting this moment in Vivian's life, Marks asks, "What went wrong?" This question alerts us to the book’s second aim: to understand what went wrong with Vivian and why she seemed—at best—apathetic toward society, though always its keen observer. Marks' skills as a corporate researcher were critical in forming a genealogy and family sketch of Vivian, yet asking about Vivian as Vivian's sympathetic companion or as another form of her image, seems to be outside the scope of this book.
Marks' ambivalence towards Vivian is clearest when discussing Vivian's appearance. Marks writes that Vivian had an "androgynous getup" paired with a "hormone imbalance" and "linebacker arms." Her oily face was "off-putting" and even "unattractive." Her "ungainly march" was paired with large men's shoes. Marks even goes so far as to include a photo—taken by another Maier researcher—of Vivian's size 12 shoe next to a ruler for empirical confirmation. At the same time, Marks lauds Vivian's unattractiveness as part of an efficient, get-er-done attitude. Marks writes, "her dispassionate demeanor worked to her photographic advantage by diminishing her own presence as she sought honest and unaffected pictures of her subjects." It's an old trope reconstituted: femininity is unserious; good artists are masculine and undistracted by style. It's a trope we've heard from men, from Marxist feminists, from dumpster-diving punks. It's an odd compulsion at this point, a way of figuring out which of us ought not to be seen. Imagine me, please: I’m writing this review in plum lipstick on the windshield of a pink Cadillac bought with Mary Kay profits. All is vanity, I do hope.
Later in the text, Marks speculates about the sexual violence Vivian may have endured and even posits that such violence could have led to her “unusual” appearance and behavior—especially an apparent hostility towards men. However, to a reader who has their own troubles with images, who sometimes looks through the camera the wrong way, discussions of trauma, psychological aberration, or topsy-turvy endocrine affairs read as cold diagnoses, almost incurious about what it is to live inside of social difference. While Marks succeeds in not boiling all Vivian's complexity down to listless identities, she passes through these significant topics hurriedly. At times, I can hear the tick of the 24-hour news cycle. "Chicago Nanny: Photographer or Pervert? Next on the Trucker Charlson News Hour." (Of course, it's both.)
Marks continues on to write that Vivian was "bred to hide her identity," "hardwired to conceal." She's a natural faker who looks like an ugly woman or a plain man. According to Marks, Vivian's concealing nature was the result of her nurture: Vivian wanted to hide her unwell family from those she knew. No schizophrenic brother, no narcissistic mother. Just Vivian, but there is no Vivian. It's a façade, but a serious façade.
Vivians’ relationships with children were perhaps as fundamental as photography. Being a nanny was her full-time occupation for the majority of her adult life. Marks documents how Vivian engaged children with curiosity and imagination, taking them on snowy picnics and introducing them to French delicacies. Although some children found her to be stern or unyielding, Marks' interviews with Vivian's former charges show that the children often worked parallel to Vivian, perhaps finding an odd kinship: children, shut out of the adult world by unbearable expectations; Vivian, different enough to have failed some of the same expectations. In one passage, Marks describes audio recordings Vivian made with the children. The children seem at ease with her, much more than later recollections by Vivian's contemporaries would suggest. It's a key thread in the book which alerts us to the possibility that Vivian wasn't disturbing or off-putting to everyone, universally, invariably.
It's undeniable that Vivian, at times, pushed the boundaries of what society would permit. In 1966, she snuck onto an active crime scene to take photos following the murder of a politician's daughter. After being escorted away by the police, she headed down the street to the church where the victim's funeral would soon take place. Here, she was recognized by the police from her earlier encounter and arrested for disorderly conduct. No doubt this behavior was pushy, maybe even invasive. Marks attributes a kind of violent, predatory intent to this behavior, writing, "With a fox-like modus operandi, she circled her targets and pounced when the moment was right." But in the context of a life so many find sensational, we have to be even more careful to parse apart our own desires to find some people shocking or repulsive. For instance, Marks recounts an occasion when Vivian—unaccustomed to being photographed by others without her permission—strikes a man who attempts to photograph her without her noticing.
Yet the complicated relationship Vivian displays with her own image in earlier chapters necessitates slowing down to ask: What does it mean for Vivian to have her image taken? Not given, but taken. Is her anxiety that her image is being formed without her—and without her right to refuse the “truth” of the photograph? Vivian's self-portraiture often consisted of shadowy forms or reflections interrupted by other objects in the frame. In her later life, Vivian's self-portraits took on a spy-like quality. She lowered broad-brimmed hats over her eyes, wore a chic if nondescript coat. This getup disrupts a very clichéd shot—the photographer looking into the mirror at themselves through the camera—as Vivian's camera covers any part of her face not obscured by hat, coat, or scarf. Her hands, bearing a large ring, become the part of her body most visible. These are the hands which pushed the shutter release, aimed the camera. It's the self-portrait of someone actively constructing images not just of herself, but of the world. Marks sees authentic selves depicted in Vivian's street photography, but these self-portraits tell a story of interference, manipulation, and concealment. Vivian is a deft artist whose camera doesn’t just capture what ‘is,’ but which should be understood as a tool for rendering Vivian’s internal realities external. Is it possible that there was nothing particularly true or honest in her images, except for our desire to find evidence through the lens of a camera?
Marks notes that Vivian at times seemed paranoid about being spied on by neighbors. Similar to the instance of Vivian striking the man on the street, I read her paranoia not a as a sign of “dysfunction” but an imminently sensible response to an unconscious understanding of her own photographic practice. Vivian at many times came close to spying on others to get the shot she wanted. Why shouldn't she fear the thought of another's lens trained upon her? And isn't that what a book like Vivian Maier Developed does—take Vivian's image away from her, give it back to the world of the 'normal'?
Marks chronicles Vivian's late-in-life hoarding, particularly of newspapers and photographic negatives, writing that, "ultimately her need to possess was greater than her need to see the pictures." And yet, despite her compulsive photographing, collecting, and keeping, Marks tells us that Vivian simply "lost steam" at age 73. No more photos. It's hard to accept that Vivian just lost steam, just petered out after a whole life of obsessive action. Vivian Maier Developed asks, if it does not answer, why Vivian picked up the camera. It doesn't ask why she put it down.
Marks' biography of Vivian Maier is an admirable condensation of the major events in the Maier family, crucial moments in Vivian's own life, and the posthumous discovery of Vivian's oeuvre. Developing Vivian Maier provides an outline of Vivian's life and work, offering researchers a general chronology. The book is able to tease so many fascinating questions about Vivian because Vivian gave so few answers in life. And yet, thinking about this artist in the negative, I am left uncertain about our attempts to render her positive, to make her make sense in the light of day. I don't know why Vivian Maier started or stopped taking photographs. Maybe the best way to see Vivian on her own terms is for me to stop asking, to leave that undeveloped.