"Finding Vivian Maier" - the movie

A few days before I left for Berlin I had heard a report on the radio about the movie „Finding Vivian Maier“. I have written about my fascination with her photos before, and this has not changed.

When I heard about the movie, I immediately knew that it would be highly unlikely this film would ever come to the theatre in my town. So I decided that I would spend at least one evening in Berlin seeing this film. (The official website for Vivian Maier with lots of interesting information can be found here.  )

I was lucky in that I happened to see a poster announcing the showing of the film during my wanderings through Berlin, even before I had started to look for it. So after setting up my stall on Friday afternoon I went to see it.

I am glad I got to do so – although I think it could have been a much better made picture than it actually is. You can find a very insightful comment on the inadequacies of the film on photographer Jim Martin’s blog . And make sure to read the article in the New Yorker that he has linked to!

In the end, I came out of the movie theatre and did not really like Mr. Maloof. In a way I admire the work he has put into unearthing some of the mysteries of Vivian Maier’s life, developing and printing her photos, and getting word out about her. But I am not sure that the story he tells about her does her justice. And I am most certain she would not have liked to have this – partly imaginary – story put out into public like this.

I am glad that through Maloof’s work we get to see her wonderful photographs, and hope that he will continue to publish books with many more of those photos. But wouldn’t it be enough to do the photos for the world to see? Says she who immediately went to see the movie when she heard about it... but I would rather have a mysterious and wonderfully talented photographer whom I don't know more about than that she nannied, than hear her talked into being a weirdo. Because I don't think she was.

Little escap(ad)e: Ré Soupault

A few weeks ago my husband brought home a flyer with the year’s program for the „Ostdeutsche Galerie“ in Regensburg. As I had never been to that museum yet and was looking for another nice exhibition worthy of a “little escap(ad)e”, I decided to take the opportunity. Together with two friends we planned a day’s outing to Regensburg to see the retrospective for Ré Soupault. Admittedly, I had never heard of her before, but the text in the flyer sounded intriguing.

Ré was obviously a woman with her very own mind. Born in 1901 as Erna Niemeyer – same age as my grandmother! – she was a student at the Bauhaus, where she was very much influenced by Itten, whose ‘Vorkurs’ she took twice. However, she got sidetracked into being technical assistant to Viking Eggeling for his “Diagonal Symphony”, the first abstract film. She never graduated from Bauhaus officially because she disliked the change towards a more functionalized orientation after Bauhaus moved to Dessau. She then started working as a fashion journalist for a Berlin fashion magazine, went to Paris as their correspondent and reported on the latest French fashion trends for the modern German woman. Eventually she started her own fashion business as “Ré Sport”, developed what she called the “transformation dress” and wanted to make wearable fashion for the modern working woman.

"transformation dress" by Ré Soupault

When her financial partner died in a car accident, she had to close her shop, however. She met French surrealist Phillipe Soupault and started traveling with him on his reporter trips through Europe. She picked up photography along the way, taking the pictures for his stories in Spain, Norway, Paris and other places. After their marriage in 1938 they moved to Tunisia where he was building a radio station, she took photos, most famous among them her pictures from the ‘reserved quarters’, where women without any family connection (and often without any other income than prostitution) lived.

Catalogue page with pictures from "reserved quarter"

During the war her husband got arrested and was imprisoned for six months. After that they left Tunisia for Algiers on a bus and had to leave everything behind, including all her photographic equipment. Parts of her belongings were recovered by a friend who found them for sale at a bazar a few years later.
Eventually they went to the States, where she started working as a translator. They traveled to South America, too, and there she ‘shot’ her famous self-portrait at a Buenos Aires fair: shooting, and hitting dead center, she took a picture of herself .

shooting her own picture: Ré Soupault

After the war the couple separated, but she eventually went back to Europe, working as a translator (she translated Romain Rolland and Lautréamont, who had up to then be considered intranslatable) and for various radio stations, producing radio reports on a wide array of topics. She had kept contact with her husband and got back together with him, and with the help of his German publisher the photographs from her photographic period were published.
These are just the briefest outlines of her long and restless life, taken from the wonderful catalogue that accompanies the exhibiton – she died in 1996, aged 95, having experienced that her creative work was beginning to be recognized.

Catalogue to the exhibition

The exhibition in Regensburg is a well-documented introduction into her life, her various kinds of work, and her multiple connections with the crème de la crème of the avantgarde.
What strikes me about her, is that she did not let unfavourable circumstances bring her down. She left, closed that period of her life, started again, something new, and again she turned out to be very good at what she was doing. Filmmaker, fashion reporter, fashion designer, photographer, translator, radio reporter – what a list of occupations! And obviously she had a talent not to worry about the past – she simply closed that period of her life for herself and went on. Which is one reason why her photographs, after her friend had recovered them on the Tunisian bazar, remained unrecognized for forty years – she had not bothered to really open the box which held what was left of her negatives.


Another interesting photographer emerging from a box, although much more seems to be known about her than about Vivian Meier.
The exhibition is still on until the 4th of September. Well worth seeing!

Street photographer recoverd from boxes - Vivian Maier

When I started writing this blog I had no idea it would be the beginning of a journey of discovery, namely the discovery of numerous (to me) new artists. Not that I would claim I know each and every single artist there is in the world, but looking for interesting topics to write about certainly has sharpened my antennae. Of these discoveries the most exciting ones that are worth sharing on the blog are certainly those where so-far unknown or long-forgotten artists get rediscovered.

The re-excavation of Marg Moll’s Dancer was such an event, and recently another discovery -for me - has happened. (Certainly I am not responsible for the actual (re)discoveries of these artists, since all I do is react to some newspaper article. But I’m glad they don’t just pass me by without me noticing! And it is nice to have a medium to share these with others.)

So here's the latest one: An article in the Süddeutsche Zeitung fascinated me: in „The Unknown“, the feuilleton wrote about the opening of an exhibition with works by Vivian Maier in Hamburg. 

French-American Vivian Maier ( 1926 - 2009 ) worked as a nanny, but really was a street photographer who must have spent virtually all her spare time photographing street scenes.

The most unbelievable – and puzzling? – part of her story is the fact that obviously she never cared to see the photos she took in a developed state. Her legacy was sold at a furniture and antiques auction, tens of thousands of negatives/film rolls in boxes. Luckily, they were bought by John Maloof, who was trying to write a book about that part of Chicago where he lives. He has been lifting the veil and secret about Vivian Maier, and is regularly posting photos from the innumerable negatives on a blog and is planning to have a book published with Vivian Maier’s photos.

And he has managed to get her work out into the public. On the blog you can find links to the media coverage that has taken place so far, and there was a show of her works in Chicago from January til early April as well as the show in Hamburg. 

Another significant part of Vivian Maier's works/collection have been bought by Jeff Goldstein, who has organized an exhibition of works to be opened in Chicago on April 15. Information can be found here.

And, of course, multiple pictures can be seen of you search the net.

First, I was mostly fascinated with the story – why did she never care to have her pictures developed? Even if she did not want to go public with them, but to keep taking tens of thousands of pictures without ever seeing how they turned out is amazing. But when I started doing my little research – and you can easily find a lot of stuff on her on the net now – I was even more fascinated by the pictures she took. What an eye she had for the perfect shot! How lucky that this kind of artistic legacy was acquired by someone who is making it accessible to others. It could well have happened that it all was lost! This way, at least she has left a shadow, one of the ways she kept including herself in her pictures (as can be seen here)...