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Vivian Maier: Nanny With a Rolleiflex

Spread over two floors in the Fotografiska building in New York’s Flatiron District, the exhibition Vivian Maier: Unseen Work (which runs through September 29) reveals a trove of surprises. The late, great street photographer was also an evocative portraitist: Maier, a notorious loner, liked to click with people. The urban documentarian of humdrum life had a knack for humor and an eye for drama.

“The scenes she photographed are often anecdotes, coincidences, lapses of reality, the residual moments of life to which no one pays attention,” notes Anne Morin, director of DiChroma Photography in Madrid and the curator of the show. “Each of her images are situated in a place where the ordinary sheds its skin and becomes extraordinary.”

Unknown Legends

The Maier scenes range widely: from newspaper headlines peeking out from piles of debris to abstracted closeups of found objects; from candid surprised faces to random odd shots of homeless people sleeping on benches. Her Super 8 films explore waves of Chicago pedestrians, a detached swarm of humanity.

As the largest Maier retrospective yet shown in America, Unseen Work bears earmarks of completism. “Some of the newest images are quite aesthetic—but many leave you wondering the intentions,” opined the Phoblographer. “They leave me wondering why these images needed to be in a museum in the first place.”

By all indications, Maier’s photographs were not intended for museum walls. In her career as a nanny, she obsessively chronicled her life and times, but rarely shared her images with others—or even developed them into prints. Her pack-rat mentality preserved the negatives, hundreds of thousands of them stowed in boxes until the end of Maier’s life (at age 83) in 2009.

It was only afterward—when photo collectors including John Maloff and Jeff Goldstein brought her work into the art world, chronicled in Maloff’s fascinating 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier—that she became a photography star.

Lights Out

And Fotografiska New York is no ordinary museum. Founded in 2019 as a stateside installment in a global cadre of photography venues—in cities including Berlin, Stockholm, Tallinn, and Shanghai—the Manhattan locale has sported six floors of exhibition space and launched some 49 ambitious and far-ranging displays, from the eccentric to the mainstream. (Showing concurrently with Maier: Brooklyn street photographer Bruce Gilden and a bevy of People magazine’s iconic portraits.)

Fotografiska has been one of the few U.S. museums devoted to photography with the space and vision for shows usually found overseas in places like Madrid’s PhotoEspaña or Arles’s Les Rencontres de la Photographie. Sadly, having survived Covid, Fotografiska New York will close its doors on September 29, at the end of its exhibitions on Maier and Gilden. While tight-lipped about the future, the museum, a for-profit business, claims it will relocate somewhere in Manhattan with a broader floorspace.

“We’ve been having ongoing challenges with regard to the exhibition spaces,” executive director Sophie Wright told the New York Times about the move—which happens as the building changes owners. “The verticality of that building is not easy to manage. Our audience has been given a bumpy experience.”

Fotografiska hopes to announce a new temporary home soon. (Yet one can’t help thinking of restaurants closing “for renovation” and wondering whether they’ll ever reopen.) It’s somehow fitting that this venue’s swan song is a vast survey of a lonesome photographer who was unknown in her lifetime, rediscovered in the internet era, and somehow became emblematic of how we see one another in the world now.

The Art of the Selfie

According to the 2021 biography Vivian Maier Developed, by genealogist Ann Marks—which meticulously traces the artist’s life, with help from photo archives in the John Maloof Collection—Maier took up photography in earnest in her mid-20s after buying a top-viewing Rolleiflex camera. “It was designed to be held at the waist, facilitating inconspicuous picture taking,” Marks notes. “With its square format, there was no need to shift from horizontal to vertical positioning. … Soon she began to compose self-portraits while cradling her camera, presenting herself as a serious photographer.”

The reclusive Maier, who routinely hid her past and inner identity from people she met, had an affinity for selfies and left behind hundreds of them. “Vivian Maier is such a big phenomenon nowadays because this problem of [the] self-portrait resonates with the selfie culture we see today,” curator Morin told artsy.net. “All that crisis of identity we are viewing on social media, with tons of selfies, finds an echo in the work of Maier. Perhaps 30 years ago, she would not have been so famous or so interesting because the selfie was not so important at that time.”

Maier’s artful self-portraits, ranging from geometric mirror shots to peekaboo shadows, seem to reflect her evolving artistic personae: the confident young New Yorker who held professional photography aspirations; the adventurous, self-sufficient world traveler; the contented nanny in the Chicago suburbs who took her charges on photo trips around the city; and, later, the oft-uprooted worker who struck a lone pose against scenes of desolation and decay.

The Kids are Alright

Throughout her adult life, Maier worked as a nanny to support her creative calling as a photographer. Her stints of employment, and relationships with families who hired her, varied widely. (One gig with talk-show host Phil Donahue lasted just a few months.) By all accounts, she was most comfortable during the 11 years she spent with the Gensburg family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois.

“She was like a real, live Mary Poppins,” Lane Gensburg later said of Maier. (However, Marks notes that Maier, a serious film buff, “wholeheartedly despised” the movie about the fictional nanny: “Her angry notes describe it as ‘outdated,’ ‘a real fiasco.’ and portraying a servant-child type of relationship.”)

In her years with the Gensburgs (1956–67), Maier bonded with the three brothers while documenting both their suburban lives and the cultural mosaic of the nearby Windy City. She left the family when the boys grew up but remained friendly. She never again found such a great fit.

Four decades later, at the end of her life, the Gensburg brothers helped Maier secure an apartment and then, after a head injury caused by a sidewalk fall, a live-in care facility. By then destitute, demented, and very delinquent on payments to a storage-locker company, Vivian Maier lost most of her possessions when the company auctioned them off.

Photo collectors John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein were among several bidders who claimed her photographs, negatives, and undeveloped film rolls (amid voluminous boxes of newspapers, books, broken cameras, and bric-a-brac, most of which was tossed or donated).

Maier never recovered from the fall. When she passed away in 2009, the Gensburgs held a memorial and published an obituary, which helped Maloof track down and identify the mysterious photographer whose images were, after appearing on Flickr and eBay, going viral and selling like pricey hotcakes in cyberspace.

Isolation and Empathy

Part of the paradox of Maier’s life and work is the disconnect between them. What the Gensburgs—or any of her employers—didn’t know about was her tangled family background, which she kept under wraps. She had her reasons: “She clearly concluded that no one would want to learn their nanny had an unstable, narcissistic mother; a violent, alcoholic father; and a drug-addicted, schizophrenic brother,” Marks explains. “It can safely be assumed that Vivian did not have DNA on her side.”

Long estranged from her nuclear family, Maier battled demons of her own: a severe and debilitating hoarding habit; and a condition that in Marks’ account, posthumously, experts term a “schizoid disorder.” The former wreaked plenty of havoc in Maier’s life, but also compelled her to preserve her trove of unpublished images. The latter strained her human interactions, yet may well have intensified her work.

Maier possessed a drive to document all her movements in the world, yet lacked any sense of follow-through in sharing them. She shunned close human contact (no hugs!) but found fascination in people she witnessed. She was detached enough to invade her subjects’ privacy, yet connected enough to see their lives. She expressed her inner self in outward reflections. She was of the last century, but it could’ve been ours.

Unlikely Legacy

After it was discovered by the art world, Maier’s body of work set off a feeding frenzy among collectors, curators, fellow photographers, critics, historians, photo aficionados … and capitalist venturers. With no direct heirs, the contents of her estate sparked disputes, lawsuits, and deal-making, with John Maloof emerging as the owner of the lion’s share of the archive and New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery as its U.S. rep. The work found its way to walls in dozens of museums around the world before landing at Fotografiska.

Who knows what Maier would say about all this? “Nothing is meant to last forever,” she once told an employer. “You have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end, and then someone else has the same opportunity.”

Through September 29, this body of work sits in a grand photo-exhibition venue that will soon be shuttered. Through the magic of the camera, reflections from the eyes of Vivian Maier have attained a sort of permanence.

~ Jack Crage · Jul 31, 2024.

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Vivian Maier and the Problem of Difficult Women

In “Finding Vivian Maier,” a new documentary about Maloof’s discovery that he directed with Charlie Siskel, interviews with Maier’s former charges, now middle-aged, do little to diminish the wondrous peculiarity of her story.

When John Maloof, a real-estate agent, amateur historian, and garage-sale obsessive, acquired a box of photographic materials and personal detritus at an auction in suburban Chicago in 2007, he quickly realized that he had stumbled upon an unknown master of street photography. But despite his vigorous snooping, he could find no record of Vivian Maier, the name scribbled on the scraps of paper that he found among the negatives, prints, and undeveloped rolls of film. He tracked down the rest of the boxes emptied from an abandoned storage garage, amassing a collection of hundreds of thousands of frames shot in New York, Chicago, France, South America, and Asia between the nineteen-fifties and the nineteen-seventies. Two years after he bought the first box, he Googled the name again and, to his surprise, found an obituary announcing that Vivian Maier had died only a few days before. The short text had just enough information for Maloof to deduce that Maier had worked as a nanny in suburban Chicago.

In “Finding Vivian Maier,” a new documentary about Maloof’s discovery that he directed with Charlie Siskel, interviews with Maier’s former charges, now middle-aged, do little to diminish the wondrous peculiarity of her story. They remember her as a woman of contradictory impulses: she was uncompromising yet playful, endlessly curious yet intensely private, and, despite being a caretaker, could be aloof to the point of callousness, even cruelty. Although none of her charges seemed to realize that she was amassing a vast body of vital work, they remember countless day trips to the seedy streets of Chicago; the daunting bustle of downtown; the boredom that set in when Maier would linger too long, taking what seemed like endless pictures of one thing.

With a twin-lens Rolleiflex camera held inconspicuously at hip-height, Maier captured fleeting moments and turned them into something extraordinary. One scowling lady fixes another’s wrinkled veil; a child with grimy cheeks and tear-filled eyes defiantly crosses her arms in front of a window display of draped gloves; a nun waits in the shadows; a prostrate inebriate cups his forehead; a young man rides an absurdly large horse under the El. Doorways, parking spots, bus stops, industrial neighborhoods, movie-theater box offices, city parks, suburban dead ends, train platforms, empty restaurant tables, storefronts, newspaper stands—she photographed the in-between, unexamined places.

“Why would a nanny be taking all these pictures?” Maloof asks in “Finding Vivian Maier.” His puzzlement reflects the central anxiety of the film, and of the Maier legend in general. Why would a photographer with the fierce dedication, creative vision, and formal skill of a Robert Frank, a Diane Arbus, or a Garry Winogrand withhold her work from the world and choose instead to spend her life raising other people’s children?

For filmmakers, for her fans, and for the people who knew her when she was alive and now must reconcile that elusive figure with her posthumous reputation as an artist, Maier’s story is titillating precisely because of how it deviates from the familiar narratives about artistic aspiration. They can’t understand why she never put aside her profession for her passion. People who never saw her without a Rolleiflex around her neck express bewilderment that they were in the company of a great talent. (“She was a nanny, for God’s sakes.”)

In the film, domestic work is placed in opposition to artistic ambition, as if the two are incompatible. But are they? Street photographers are often romanticized as mystical flâneurs, who inconspicuously capture life qua life, who are in the world, but not of it. The help, like the street photographer, is supposed to be invisible. Menial tasks like child care have, historically, been relegated to working-class women, who give up domestic autonomy to live in intimate proximity to their employers while remaining employees. In the best circumstances, a nanny becomes a trusted member of the family and allows her identity and independence to be entwined with, even subsumed by, the people for whom she works. In the worst circumstances, she is expendable, replaceable; her bath-time instructions and dinnertime offerings and bedtime kisses are tasks just as easily completed by the helpers who precede or follow her. Both the photographer and the nanny evoke fantasies of invisibility that rely on the erasure of real labor, but for opposite ends. “Women’s work” is diminished and ignored while the (historically male) artist’s pursuit is valorized as a creative gift. Perhaps the nanny could be the perfect person to photograph the world unnoticed. Maybe the very thing that made people hire her as a nanny—her watchfulness, her “alertness to human tragedies and those moments of generosity and sweetness,” as the photographer Joel Meyerowitz puts it in the film—made her the artist we know she was.

It seems that, for Maier, the nanny’s life allowed her to be with people, but not of them. She actively cultivated her own unknowability, perhaps as a way to maintain this separateness. She never spoke of a desire to make a living as a photographer. In Chicago, where she lived for decades, she refused to give film processors and pawn shopkeepers her real name, instead handing out fake names all over town. She demanded separate locks for her rooms in her employers’ homes, and forbade anyone from ever entering her space. She didn’t mention family or old friends. She lied about where she was born, claiming France as her homeland (she was born in New York City in 1926), and spoke with a contrived Continental accent that no one could place. She dressed in an outdated style, or, as one interviewee put it, “like a Soviet factory worker from the nineteen-fifties.” In the film, an acquaintance recalls asking her what she did for a living. Her response: “I’m a sort of spy.”

Most people who hear about Maier might agree with the photographer’s pawnshop broker, who tells the filmmakers, “I find the mystery of it more interesting than the work itself.” The filmmakers give Maier’s purposeful obscurity and fiercely guarded solitude a tragic cast: Her former charges recall her “dark edge,” the way she spoke about the brutality of men, the temper that, on occasion, bordered on abusive. Her old employers described how she filled her quarters with hoarded treasures and towering piles of yellowing newsprint. She was obsessed with newspapers in particular; one woman recalls how Maier went nuts upon realizing that a neighbor had taken old editions out of the house in order to finish a painting job.

Her archives of pictures, films, and voice recordings reveal a fascination with rape and murder, urban blight and the ravages of poverty, the brutality of the city stockyards, political unrest. The film implicitly suggests that there is something off about this, that her interest in “I told you so” stories, the ones that revealed “the folly of humanity,” “the bizarreness of life, the unappealingness of human beings,” as one of her charges describes it, is symptomatic of a haunted, morbid psychology. The insinuation is that interests in such subjects is inherently unseemly, even though these are the kinds of stories that have captivated journalists for eons.

“Finding Vivian Maier” shows that stories of difficult women can be unflattering even when they are told in praise. The unconventional choices of women are explained in the language of mental illness, trauma, or sexual repression, as symptoms of pathology rather than as an active response to structural challenges or mere preference. Biographers often treat iconoclastic women like Yoko Ono, Marie Curie, Emily Dickinson, and Vivian Maier as problems that need solving. They’re problems as in “How do you solve a problem like Maria,” to borrow an allusion from an Ariana Reines’s essay about another often simplified woman photographer, Francesca Woodman.

There’s no disputing that Maier was peculiar and prickly, and that her interests spanned the benign and the morbid. But she was neither a Mary Poppins nor a surrogate Mommie Dearest. The people who knew her described an impenetrability that, even in retrospect, threatens the fantasy that people who choose to care for children are all hugs and rainbows. Her story suggests the unsympathetic possibility that a woman might choose something like nannying because it has an economic rather than emotional utility. As Janet Malcolm writes in her New Yorker essay about the Bloomsbury Group, “A House of One’s Own,” “Every character in a biography contains within himself or herself the potential for a reverse image.” So let’s consider “Finding Vivian Maier” in reverse: Maier challenges our ideas of how a person, an artist, and, especially, a woman should be. She didn’t try to use her work to accumulate cultural or economic capital. She was poor but uninterested in money: when Maloof went through her possessions, he found thousands of dollars in uncashed Social Security checks. She didn’t marry or have children, and, when people mistakenly called her Mrs. Maier, she would reply, “It’s Miss Maier, and I’m proud of it,” echoing another female artist, who often instructed strangers not to call her “Mrs. Stieglitz” but “Miss O’Keeffe.” She died before developing more than a thousand rolls of exposed film, and there is no proof that she ever made a concerted effort to show her work to any dealers or other artists. To suggest that her choices were the result of some as yet uncovered emotional trauma is to assume that her life was lived in reaction to pain. But this shoehorns her into the very conventions of capitalism and bourgeois values that she eschewed so aggressively.

When she was a girl, she briefly lived in close quarters with a noted female photographer, Jeanne Bertrand, who may have taught the young Maier how to take pictures. I wonder what Maier learned from her, what she told her about trying to be an artist. I wonder what kinds of opportunities would have existed for Maier decades later, and which of the same impediments. Maier had neither money nor connections, but she had control over how she lived, what she looked at, and what she photographed.

Maier was not a closed-off shut-in like Henry Darger, another Chicago artist canonized after his death. Her photographs of the urban and suburban streets track the fluctuations of the economy, the growth of the city, the cycles of the seasons, the emotions in the faces of the children she cared for, the way her own body advanced through the years. She chose her job not because she especially loved children but because of the life it enabled her to have, what it allowed her to see. She valued her freedom above all. Her art and profession have more in common than it may initially seem. She was a perpetual outsider, and she liked it that way. She moved among people but did not belong to any of them. She was close but not entangled. She could always walk away. In the documentary, when Maloof describes how Maier spent the late fifties and sixties, travelling and photographing the world alone, this did not strike me as the least bit sad. It seemed that, on those trips, Maier was the most free she had ever been, and ever would be. That’s how she wanted to see herself. And she did.

Some tellings of Maier’s story suggest that perhaps we should feel a proxy regret, that we should feel sorry about her solitude, her rages, her dark edges, her impecunious existence. Shall we make her a martyr or can we allow that she may have had the life she wanted? How did she see herself? We know that she was looking at that, too—the copious self-portraits prove it. She often photographed her own sphinx-like expression in the reflection of bathroom mirrors, car windows, shop windows, shards of glass and curves of aluminum. She captured her shadow creeping across the frame to touch an empty sidewalk, a lone horseshoe crab, a flowering lawn. These pictures help me to understand, finally, that Maier isn’t invisible, except to us. She was looking at herself all along.

~ Rose Lichter-Marck · May 9, 2014.

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Vivian Maier: A life through the viewfinder

A decade ago, experts and the general public were surprised by the impressive photographic work of a previously unknown artist: Vivian Maier. With her camera, she told everyday stories from New York and Chicago by capturing decisive and often bizarre moments on the street. Her photos document real life in the United States from the 1950s onwards in the most impressive way. Although she had no photographic training and no interest in presenting her extraordinary skills to a wider audience, her work has attracted unprecedented posthumous attention.

Biography as film and book

In addition to Vivian Maier’s surprising work, her discovery provided enough material for the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier. Unemployed estate agent John Maloof stumbled across a gem by chance when he bought a box of Maier’s negatives at auction, triggering an avalanche. In October 2009, as a hitherto photographic layman, he asked in Flickr’s Hard Core Street Photography Forum: “Is this kind of work worthy of an exhibition or a book? Or do works like this happen often?”

The search for Vivian Maier and the meticulous research of her biographer Ann Marks have brought numerous pieces of the puzzle of Vivian Maier’s problematic life circumstances to light. After six years of intensive detective work, the book Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny was written. It is captivating and even really exciting at the end. Nevertheless, it leaves the reader enough room for their own interpretations.

The biographer devotes a great deal of time to researching Vivian Maier’s family history and her personal environment. Apart from some of the children she looked after, Vivian Maier had hardly any personal ties to other people. Anyone who sees her sometimes distant, but often ironic pictures today would like to know more about Vivian Maier and her ability to create such masterpieces. During her lifetime, however, no one was able to do so, as she only took photographs for herself and showed no interest in experiencing the effect of her pictures.

Contradictions and coincidences

Vivian Maier was obsessed with photography, but had no professional goals as a photographer. She is only known to have worked on one commission, for which she noted the sale price of $1.00 on the negative sleeve. She collected her photographs of street scenes in cardboard boxes and did not even develop the exposed films at the end. Her gainful employment as a nanny seemed to be adequate and could be easily reconciled with the time she had available each day for photo stalking while the children were at school. Joint exploratory walks may be exciting for some children, but the reality of carcasses in a cattle yard was not exactly child-friendly. The best documented is the good relationship with the Gensburg family, whose three sons Vivian Maier looked after for eleven years from 1956 to 1967. However, the Gensburgs only found out about the extent of Vivian’s street photography after her death through John Maloof.

Good street photographers comment on the everyday life of their time through their choice of subject, image composition and the right moment. They find their personal signature not so much through professional photographic training, but through the learned ability to be unobtrusive and make quick decisions. Typical: the sleeping newspaper vendor in his kiosk framed by comics and news about glamor and terror. In Vivian Maier’s case, however, this inconspicuousness was often accompanied by a boldness with which she was able to photographically expose some people without regard for personal rights.

Estate, copyright and curation

Legal issues almost prevented Vivian Maier’s estate from remaining accessible to the public. John Maloof, the discoverer of Maier’s photographs, is in his own way similarly obsessed as she is. He devotes the energy she put into working with her camera to cataloging and curating the collection. Controversies about pictures that no one else had saved threatened to sabotage everything as soon as the world became interested in Vivian Maier.

The second strength of Ann Marks’ book, in addition to tracing Vivian Maier’s life, is the fact-based documentation of the handling of her estate. She herself was not burdened with all the issues that were disputed after her death. At least a foundation is now ensuring that Vivian Maier’s work no longer has to languish in boxes. In 2017, John Maloof bequeathed a collection of Vivian Maier’s camera equipment and 500 photographic prints to the University of Chicago. Thus, apart from completely inappropriate financial considerations, it is possible to explore how Vivian Maier herself probably wanted her photographs to be processed.

~ Doug Bierend · July, 2014.

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The Story of Vivian Maier, a Legendary Photographer We Almost Never Knew

If you haven’t heard of Vivian Maier, you're hardly alone. It's something of a miracle that anyone has, even though she stands among the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier made tens of thousands of intimate, humorous, and powerful portraits over the course of her life, and shoved them all into boxes that went undiscovered until a serendipitous $300 bid at an auction in 2007. It was only after Maier's death in 2009 that people recognized the genius of her photos, which can hang alongside those of Robert Frank, Dianne Arbus, or Henri Cartier Bresson.

Finding Vivian Maier tells the story of her long life (she died at 83) and exquisite work, and chronicles the immense task of piecing the story together from the clues she left behind. No less fascinating is the story of the film's co-director, John Maloof, who placed that winning bid and worked hard to bring Maier's work the global recognition he’s certain it deserves.

Maloof purchased a box containing 40,000 negatives of photos Maier made in the 1960s. He hoped to use them to illustrate Portage Park, a book he co-authored about life on the city’s northwest side. The photos didn't suit his needs, but Maloof grew so obsessed by them that he left real estate to take up photography. Unsure what else to do with the pictures, he posted a selection of them online and created a Flickr thread asking, "what do I do with this stuff?" The thread blew up, and Maloof realized just what he’d stumbled on: A one-of-a-kind historical document and trove of unseen world-class art.

Maier’s photos, snapped mostly with the boxy Rolleiflex camera perpetually dangling from her neck, are clever, idiosyncratic, and sensitive to the absurd nuances of daily life--qualities of a great street photographer. But her talent, sense of humor, and physical appearance (Maier took her share of selfies) are all we learn about her from the pictures alone. Maloof needed to dig for everything else.

One of the great achievements of this documentary is the DIY detective work Maloof and fellow filmmaker Charlie Siskel did in piecing together the narrative of a deliberately mysterious woman. Using every resource he could think of--including scouring Google images to match the steeples seen in some of Maier's photos with those seen in the French countryside-–the sudden documentarian guides us through the story of Maier’s life. His passion for telling the story is contagious, and it's easy to share his excitement over each new tidbit of information. The picture that emerges is, like her work, sometimes charming, and sometimes all too real.

Maier was born in New York and made her living as a nanny there and in Chicago, probably because the job allowed her time to make pictures. The children, now grown, that she cared for and many of their parents provide the most insight. They describe Maier as intelligent, adventurous, and intensely private. She had also mastered the photographer's balance of being curious and bold while remaining aloof and removed. She also could be irritable and temperamental, prone to strange (even violent) outbursts that sometimes cost her jobs. Through it all, she never quit taking photos, even if meant bringing her young charges to the shopping center, slum or slaughterhouse she felt like shooting that day.

Her compulsive chronicling of the world around her expanded to include color photography and film; reels and reels of audio tape feature guerrilla interviews conducted in supermarket lines. Maier also was a bona fide hoarder, stacking newspapers in her rooms until the floors literally sagged. Early in the film Maloof lays out artifacts, acquired from storage lockers and other buyers at the 2007 auction, and they cover the entire floor. The material includes more than 100,000 negatives; thousands of notes, receipts, newspaper clippings; and countless marginalia. There was a lot to unravel, let alone weave into a coherent story, and the filmmakers do a great job bringing it all together.

Some reviews have panned Finding Vivian Maier for being little more than an advertisement for the publishing business Maloof has built upon her photos. He briefly addresses this in the documentary, arguing that with Maier dead and no estate to represent her, there is no one else to champion her work. In the film, he reads the rejection letter the MoMA sent him early in his project. Whether the project is driven by duty or profit ultimately doesn't matter, because it's a fascinating story told well, and we're lucky Maier's photos fell into the hands of someone with the will and the means to ensure people saw them.

Another relevant question is whether Maier would wanted the attention. The film makes abundantly clear just how obsessed she was with privacy. Maloof acknowledges this conundrum, but finds justification with the discovery (accompanied in the film by a soaring string section soundtrack) of a single note to a small photo printing shop in a tiny village in France. In it, Maier suggests going into business with the printmaker to create postcards from some of her photos. Her humble proposal may not indicate anything akin to interest in the vast publicity campaign that's made her posthumously popular, with her likeness and photos circulating the globe under the Maloof Collection emblem.

Still, without Maloof's work, the odds that Maier's amazing body of work would ever be widely seen are miniscule. It isn't easy getting people to notice, much less celebrate, a new name in the arts. The photographers so often invoked to describe Maier's work had time to define their era and influence later generations of photographers. Her work has the legitimacy to be no less influential, but lacks the cultural currency. That is changing, however, with the reach of the internet. Finding Vivian Maier is therefore not just an account of a gifted photographer's life, but a call for the art establishment to take her work seriously.

In that way, it has a chance of adding a name to the canon of great street photographers. That is an achievement worth celebrating.

~ Doug Bierend · July, 2014.

[impressivepress]

Vivian Maier was almost never found

Artists tell stories. Vivian Maier never got to tell hers while she was alive. Instead during her life, she opted to tell the stories of others. A nanny by trade, a street photographer by hobby, Vivian Maier died with over 150,000 unpublished photos to her name - and that’s it. Mostly based in New York and Chicago, Maier captured images of the jostling cities and their at-the-time normal events, immortalizing the lived experience of US megacities’ citizens in the mid-to-late 20th Century.

Maier’s Life

There are few things about Maier’s life we know for certain. Vivian was born in New York City on February 1st, 1929 to a French mother. Shortly after her birth, they would go back to France, eventually returning to New York for a brief period in 1939. In 1951, Maier would make the trip alone back to New York where she would live until her move to Chicago in 1956. Here, she would continue to be the “Mary Poppins” nanny of three boys, highlighting her trips in her now-iconic works.

And those are just about the only things that are certain. In 2007, John Maloof, a photo collector writing a book on historic Chicago, blindly purchased a box full of negatives from a storage auction. Unknowingly, he had purchased a lot from Vivian Maier’s storage facility, which she had ceased to make payments on in her old age. After developing some of the photos and recognizing their immense beauty, he acquired more of her photos from a different buyer at the same auction. Mystified by this enigmatic auteur he had stumbled upon, Maloof searched for further information about who Vivian Maier was; unfortunately, he was unable to find any details about her until a final Google search in 2009 revealed her death just two months prior – starting the hunt to tell Maier’s story.

Maloof’s search was compiled into the 2013 documentary, Finding Vivian Maier. While the documentary aims to uncover the life of the nanny, the search ends with more questions than answers. Later, the more comprehensive Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny book was published in 2023. The work took genealogy and family records along with an in-depth analysis into her 140,000 photos to shed light into Maier’s world of mystery.

Her Work

Maier’s timelessness starts with her subjects. Her captures of the poor, children and the “average person” illuminates a side of 60s Chicago rarely shown before. This realness captivates the viewer with a rare intimacy of the normal. Today, its easy to find glamorous photos of Chicago’s Skyline and the historic State Street, but it’s not authentic. Most history serves as a highlight told by the winners, forever excluding the emotion and complexities of real life. Maier’s work is a time capsule of real lives, creating a gateway for audiences to realize some things never change.

Aside from her diverse catalog of emotions, Maier’s ability to capture raw emotion adds to her timelessness. She never backed down from intimacy, oftentimes capturing moments that throws the audience into her eyes. She used simplicity to convey pathos, Maier captured images of elderly love, childlike curiosity and human connection frequently. Her eye for simple photos and emotion provides the audience a genuine emotional connection to 60s and 70s Chicago. She shows elements that could easily have been lost in the annals of history.

Not only did she paint pictures of real emotion, she chronicled the pulse of the nation. Whether its the street-style recreation of Marylyn Monroe’s iconic shot or her frequent capture of newspapers, it displays an artist in-tune with her time. Maier’s captures of the working class on the streets of Chicago and New York provide a unique, high-quality snapshot into real life at a time where photos were only taken by the wealthy.

Maier’s later-in-life colored photos show yet another side of Maier. Her use and capture of bright colors shows an artist with an affinity for vibrance. She loved bright fashion, a side of the city fashion rarely represented in street photography at the time. Her captures of complimentary colors spans outfits, flowers and social settings. This period of hers adds a sense of liveliness to her work, a feeling that’s rarely authentic in historic captures of the cities.

Legacy of Her Works

Maier’s story is one that leaves more questions than answers. With Maier’s before-fame passing, the questions keep piling on. But now, they shift to questions of legacy rights. Who has the rights to her iconic catalogue? Who is responsible for managing her post-mortem millions? And more importantly, is this what the reclusive Vivian Maier would have wanted?

Currently, Maloof owns the rights to over 90% of Maier’s total outputs. He uses his majority ownership to tell her story, creating collections and distributing to museums across the globe. Despite international success, Maloof cannot sell her works. Although Maloof owns the physical copies of Maier’s work, copyright rights for the content of the photos withstand the authors passing for 70 years, unless otherwise stated in the will. Due to this, her work and legacy is protected from complete private ownership.

With Maier’s passing before her superstardom, one can’t help but wonder if this what she would have wanted with her thousands of works. In her life, Maier was reclusive. The people closest her always saw her and her trademarked camera, but never saw the works her camera produced. She was an intensely private person, and as evidenced by her mysterious behavior, never let anyone get too close. The intimacy of her works shows a side of Maier she never let come to life.

Personally, I think this adds to her legend. In her life, no one got to truly know Vivian Maier. In viewing her thousands of photos the audience feels privy to parts of her it feels we weren’t supposed to see, adding to her intrigue. While her photos characterize the artist more than she ever would allow while she was alive, it promotes an air of mystery atop of her incredible snapshots into 60s America, creating a sense of mysticism around her works. In a world where everything needs a reason and a motive, Vivian Maier’s is one that gets more perplexing the more you analyze it. It’s unlikely anyone will ever know the true Vivian Maier, but no one was supposed to. Some things are simply better as a mystery.

~ Nickolas Holcomb.

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The Trouble With Writing About Vivian Maier

Biographers get distracted by the photographer’s unusual life story—to the point of diminishing her work itself.

Until 12 years ago, the photographer Vivian Maier was largely unknown. Though she shot incessantly from 1950 until about a decade before her death in 2009, she hid her pictures, literally locking them away. Often, she didn’t even bother to develop her rolls of film. She made money as a live-in nanny for families in New York and Chicago (briefly working for talk-show host Phil Donahue). As she got older, she rented storage lockers to house her overwhelming accumulation of books, magazines, newspapers, and other miscellany. The contents of those lockers were auctioned off in 2007 after she fell into arrears, which is how then-26-year-old John Maloof, a former art student, began purchasing the bulk of Maier’s archive: more than 140,000 images, most of them undeveloped and unprinted. A couple of years later, he uploaded some of the pictures to a street photography group on Flickr to immediate acclaim.

The images arrived already imbued with the aura of permanence. They sometimes evoke the wanderlust of Robert Frank’s photos, the wry self-deprecation of Lee Friedlander, or the grubbiness of Weegee, but they’re not derivative. Attentive to plaintive or absurd interludes in American life, primarily in New York City and Chicago, Maier made a piecemeal record of the sudden encounters and furtive gestures that turn any street into a guerrilla theater. She captured politicians on the campaign trail (Eisenhower, Kennedy, Nixon, LBJ); celebrities at premieres or out in the wild (Frank Sinatra, John Wayne, Greta Garbo, Audrey Hepburn); laborers and commuters; drunks, criminals, and down-and-outs; flaneurs and well-coiffed women in furs. She cataloged the textures and cast-offs of the urban environment: graffiti, fire escapes, signs, garbage, shadows, abandoned newspapers, half-demolished buildings. She easily switched between registers, from gentle wit—as in a 1975 photo of an elderly trio crossing a Chicago street in rhyming yellow apparel, or a 1960s photo of an imperious dog loitering beneath a pay phone—to almost ethnographic sincerity, as in her photos from a six-month solo voyage around the world in 1959. She often photographed children, particularly when they were aggrieved or lost in adultlike introspection. Above all, she made images of casual lyricism, as in her celebrated 1957 photo of a woman in white drifting through a dark Florida night. Maier’s are the kinds of photos about which you can only say: These are the real deal.

The fact that Maier was dead by the time she became famous has proved a boon for her posthumous renown; in her absence, the mysteries around the photographer-nanny became irresistible hooks for editors and curators. Maloof has been entrepreneurial about marketing her story. At least half a dozen monographs have appeared in the last decade, bolstered by numerous exhibitions and a steady chorus of press. In 2015, Finding Vivian Maier, a documentary that Maloof co-directed, was nominated for an Oscar and burnished Maier’s legend further. If she’s not quite in the canon yet, she’s certainly wait-listed.

Maier has also been the subject of two notable biographies. The first, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, by Pamela Bannos, was released in 2016. The second, Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny, by Ann Marks, exemplifies the allure and risks of writing about the enigmatic Maier. Marks, a former marketing executive at Dow Jones, began to dig into Maier’s life after watching Maloof’s film. She kicks off her biography with a brassy sales pitch: “By book’s end, key questions will be answered, including the one everyone asks: ‘Who was Vivian Maier, and why didn’t she share her photographs?’ Mystery solved.”

Well, maybe, maybe not. Treating Maier like a riddle makes for good jacket copy but can also turn her into a kind of Rorschach: One sees in her whatever the critical mode du jour demands. Circa 2011, she was “the best street photographer you’ve never heard of,” to quote Mother Jones. Today, she is an aerosol of neuroses and quirks, the lonely spinster who shampooed with vinegar and slathered Vaseline on her face; who wore men’s size 12 shoes; who dumped drippings from a roast pan into a glass and drank them. As Marks describes Maier’s eccentricities, she starts to play the amateur clinician, marshaling hypotheses from medical experts whose secondhand diagnoses foreground a story of trauma and unwitting victimhood. Commercial publishers require a takeaway, and so Maier becomes here something she would have detested: an inspiration.

Maier is a tricky subject for a biographer. She spent the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s as a nanny, shuttling between families, or sometimes enjoying the reprieve of stable employment. (Her longest post was 11 years.) Whenever she moved, she locked her room and forbade anyone from entering. She seems not to have had romantic relationships, and had few personal ties. She left behind little by way of diaries or letters. Marks bases part of her portrait of Maier on the recollections of people who knew her glancingly, who remember her as an “extraterrestrial” figure. “She was … a very foreign presence in Highland Park,” recalls a friend of the Gensburgs, the family that employed Maier the longest. Marks’s physical rundown suggests why:

[Maier] dressed formally; her everyday attire consisted of a tailored suit or crisp Peter Pan–collared blouse paired with a calf-length skirt. She still wore old-fashioned rolled-down stockings, unable to make the transition to pantyhose. It was all covered up with oversize men’s coats in beiges and grays and topped with a trademark floppy hat.

Adding to the sense of foreignness was Maier’s brusqueness and penchant for French expressions. She presented a stern image that seemed at odds with the sensibility of her photos: The strict disciplinarian who insisted that her young charges address her as “Mademoiselle” and who sometimes slapped the children in her care also created a portfolio rife with humor and tenderness. More puzzling still, the woman who once traveled the world alone, who frankly espoused her opinions, and who seethed with ambition spent most of her adult life in the suburbs, anonymously plying her art. Marks begins her book with an epigraph of dichotomous terms acquaintances used to describe Maier, among them: Caring/Cold, Feminine/Masculine, Jovial/Cynical, Passionate/Frigid, Social/Solitary, Mary Poppins/Wicked Witch.

Despite her outward formality, a streak of playfulness runs through her photographs. In her more than 600 self-portraits, she finds ingenious ways to use mirrors and storefront windows to reflect her plain intensity, or else manifests as a kind of negative presence, as in more oblique shots of her shadow against sidewalks and walls. A self-portrait from the 1970s depicts her shadow against a laborer’s mud-spattered behind; another shows her shadow hovering amid a patch of buttercups (an image later used on a dress displayed in Bergdorf Goodman’s storefront). Other self-portraits are more direct: Maier reflected in a car mirror, her face neutral, aloof. According to Marks, Maier almost never let anyone else take her picture. How are we to understand these paradoxes?

In Marks’s telling, Maier inherited a split sense of self. Maier’s mother, Marie Jaussaud, was born in France in 1897, the illegitimate daughter of a teenage fling. “The baby girl was welcomed into a world where she officially didn’t exist,” Marks writes, noting that this shame “set into motion three generations of family dysfunction.” By 1919, Marie had immigrated to New York City, where she married an alcoholic steam engineer named Charles Maier. The couple gave birth to a son, Carl, in 1920, and to a daughter, Vivian, in 1926. The Maiers’ marriage was unhappy, and in 1932 Marie and Vivian fled to France, leaving young Carl behind. Mother and daughter returned to New York in 1938, where Maier eventually lodged with a widowed family friend, and found work in a doll factory (perhaps accounting for some later shots of dolls discarded in trash cans).

In 1950, Maier again returned to France. It was there she began taking photographs with a box camera: panoramas of the Alps, studies of the region’s working class, portraits of family. “It is clear from her early negatives and prints that Vivian possessed a great deal of confidence,” Marks writes. “She typically covered her subjects with just one shot, an approach that would become a trademark.” In the spring of 1951, Maier returned to New York, where she continued shooting, and even flirted with the idea of launching a picture postcard business. Most importantly, Maier revolutionized her practice by purchasing a Rolleiflex camera, which allowed her to literally shoot from the hip.

Marie almost entirely disappears from the biography after this point. “[She] stands out as disturbed and mentally unstable, even among a group of troubled individuals,” Marks writes of Maier’s mother. A doctor who examined the family records for this biography suggests that Marie had narcissistic personality disorder. She rarely held a steady job and was allergic to housework. She fabricated medical ailments, and in a letter to an officer about Carl’s care, she strikes a paranoid tone, lamenting that everyone had “plotted against” her. Although Marks acknowledges that it’s impossible to accurately diagnose Marie, this doesn’t stop her from premising the whole biography on such drive-by psychologizing. Indeed, the book is a case study for what responsible biographers shouldn’t do.

Some of Marks’s theories are more credible than others. It’s likely, for example, that Maier was a hoarder. By the time she died, she had crammed more than eight tons of possessions into storage lockers. (Her hoarding cost her at least one nanny job.) At other times, though, Marks’s hypotheses are purely speculative. “Physical and sexual abuse can contribute to trauma,” she writes, “and Vivian’s behavior suggests that she may have endured this type of exploitation.” The behavior in question—Maier’s distaste for physical intimacy, her fusty wardrobe, and her cautioning young girls against sitting on men’s laps—doesn’t strike me as compelling evidence of childhood sexual abuse so much as the traits of a reserved woman with old-fashioned notions of propriety. “[Maier’s] brother was definitively diagnosed with schizophrenia, and her mother almost certainly had a history of some sort of mental illness,” Marks writes. “Many felt Vivian’s grandfather Nicolas Baille may have also, based on his antisocial behavior and extreme paranoia.” (Marks doesn’t specify whom she means by “Many.”) She asks the same doctor who diagnosed Maier’s mother to take a crack at Maier herself. The verdict: Maier was perhaps a “classic case of schizoid disorder.”

Marks uses the fact of Carl Maier’s schizophrenia to prop up this diagnosis. One of the assets of her largely lackluster biography is the gumshoe work she does chasing down Carl’s records and filling in his story. (The book’s multiple appendixes, including one devoted to “genealogical tips,” suggests that building out a family tree is Marks’s real passion.) Carl was imprisoned at age 16 for tampering with the mail and forging a check. He joined the military but was dishonorably discharged for a drug-related offense. He bounced in and out of psychiatric hospitals as an adult and died of an aortic thrombosis at a rest home in 1977, at age 57. He and Maier had little contact with each other, although Marks portrays them as heirs to a common bloodline of mental illness. Marks takes Carl’s diagnosis at face value, despite how often the label schizophrenia was slapped onto criminalized bodies at mid-century, particularly among institutionalized drug users. Still, let’s grant that Carl had some kind of genetic psychological disturbance—what does that mean for Maier?

It means that her creativity, her art, is inextricable from mental illness. That’s a generic enough argument, but in Marks’s hands, it turns cloying. Her interpretations of Maier’s work sometimes take unfortunate cues from clinical analyses. She quotes a father-son duo of Freudian therapists who posit that “the negative themes that surface in Vivian’s portfolio—including death, violent crime, demolition, and garbage—represent subconscious reflections of her low self-esteem.” Name any worthwhile photographer—any worthwhile artist—and you’ll encounter “negative themes.” This is vapid psychoanalysis and even worse critical writing.

As I read, I was increasingly irritated by this reductive and patronizing portrayal of Maier. (This is underscored by how Marks refers to Maier as “Vivian.” “I use her first name throughout because this is how most people know and speak about her,” Marks writes by way of explanation. She doesn’t consider that Maier, who worked in a service capacity all of her life, was unlikely to be addressed by her surname.) “With immense strength of character and perseverance,” Marks writes, “Vivian developed compensatory qualities and coping mechanisms, like photography, to manage her mental health issues.” In Marks’s account, Maier is a mentally ill woman who took photos almost as a therapeutic tic rather than a full-fledged artist with (perhaps) a mental illness. Maier’s self-portraits, according to Marks, are simply ways to substantiate herself in the world—signposts of a woman who was forever unmoored. Even Maier’s prolificness is evidence of a compulsion, as if her taking pictures was of a piece with her hoarding of newspapers. Marks never considers that perhaps Maier just enjoyed being a photographer, and that the act of framing a shot was itself creatively fulfilling. Would anyone point to a writer’s pile of false starts and trashed drafts as signs of a mental disorder?

Just because Maier often didn’t develop her rolls of film and rarely produced prints (and almost never exhibited them) doesn’t mean that her creative practice was somehow stunted or insular. That’s a careerist view of how a photographer should operate. Maier was undoubtedly a serious, dedicated, and consummate artist, largely self-taught, who honed her craft over decades. As Marks herself notes, Maier was more than a hobbyist, even from the beginning: “Altogether, the thousands of early images … confirm how intensely Vivian worked to master the basics of photography during her time in [France].” In New York, Maier sought out “colleagues to learn from, collaborate with, and engage in shoptalk.” She assiduously cropped images and experimented with color film. Even by the end of her career, Maier was known to leave precise instructions for the technicians entrusted with developing her images. But by pressing her into a queasy Hallmark narrative of a woman triumphing over her demons, Marks’s biography unintentionally undervalues Maier’s achievement. Photography wasn’t a “coping mechanism” but her life’s work.

“I’m sort of a spy,” Maier once told someone who asked about her profession. She was being cheeky, but the remark indicates how she saw herself: as a witness and a trespasser, a woman interested in momentary revelations of truth, no matter how painful or embarrassing or fraught. Her photographs represent a vast album of American street life across five decades, and, parallel to that, a chronicle of Maier’s own place in that landscape. It’s a body of work that’s simultaneously objective and subjective, in which Maier is both the author and a recurrent, ambiguous protagonist who lends the entire undertaking a kind of self-referential weight. Contrary to Marks’s argument, I see no meaningful distinction between the photographer and the world in Maier’s work. She doesn’t appear to me as an isolated woman trying to fix her coordinates in a universe from which she was somehow estranged. She looks, instead, like a woman who was profoundly and intuitively present.

If you read enough biographies, you realize that the genre has a fatal flaw, a system error: Every person is unknowable, not least of all to themselves. There is, in everyone, some small cinder of truth that never sees the light of day. Biographers pretend that this cinder can be revealed, and that order can be imposed upon an unruly life. That’s a lie. Ann Marks hasn’t solved the mystery of Maier—why would we want her to? The photographer’s mystery remains intact, suffusing the thousands of indelible images she left behind in those storage lockers. It’s better to look there for the truth of her life, in those pictures of the world that she put away, as if she saw, and understood, what the rest of us never would. ~ Jeremy Lybarger · Dec 21, 2021.

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The Life and Work of Street Photographer Vivian Maier

A LIFE IN SHADOW: The North Shore families who hired Vivian Maier as a nanny came to know a kind but eccentric woman who guarded her private life and kept a huge stash of boxes. A chance discovery after her death by a man named John Maloof has spotlighted her secret talent as a photographer and led to a growing appreciation of her vast work.

On an unremarkable day in late 2007, John Maloof, a young real-estate agent, spent some time at a local auction house, RPN Sales in Portage Park, combing through assortments of stuff—some of it junk—that had been abandoned or repossessed. A third-generation reseller, Maloof hoped to find some historical photographs for a small book about Portage Park that he was cowriting on the side. He came across a box that had been repossessed from a storage locker, and a hasty search revealed a wealth of black-and-white shots of the Loop from the 1950s and ’60s. There’s got to be something pertinent in there, he thought. So he plunked down about $400 for the box and headed home. A closer examination unearthed no scenes of Portage Park, though the box turned out to contain more than 30,000 negatives. Maloof shoved it all into his closet.

Something nagged, however—perhaps a reflex picked up from working the flea market circuit as a poor kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago. Though he knew almost nothing about photography, he eventually returned to the box and started looking through the negatives, scanning some into his computer. There was a playfulness to the moments the anonymous artist had captured: a dapper preschool boy peeking from the corner of a grimy store window; an ample rump squeezing through the wooden planks of a park bench; a man in a three-piece suit napping, supine, in the front seat of his car, his right arm masking his face from the daylight. Whoa, Maloof mused. These are really cool. Who took them?

A contact at the auction house didn’t know the photographer’s name but told Maloof that the contents of the repossessed storage locker had belonged to an elderly woman who was ill. As time passed, Maloof tracked down a handful of people who had acquired similar caches of negatives once owned by the same woman, and he bought the boxes off them. With the collection becoming expensive to maintain, this lifelong reseller did what came naturally: He cut up some of the negatives and hawked them on eBay. They proved startlingly popular—some sold for as much as $80 a pop. Maloof realized that he’d come across something special, and he determined to crack the case of the anonymous photographer.

One day in late April 2009, more than a year after he bought that first box at RPN, Maloof got a break. He found an envelope from a photo lab buried in one of the boxes. Scribbled in pencil was a name: Vivian Maier. One hit from a Google search linked to an item from the Chicago Tribune that had been posted just days before. It was the paid death notice for an 83-year-old woman: “Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully on Monday. Second mother to John, Lane and Matthew. A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her. Always ready to give her advice, opinion or a helping hand. Movie critic and photographer extraordinaire. A truly special person who will be sorely missed but whose long and wonderful life we all celebrate and will always remember.”

After a call to the Tribune left him with a faulty address and a disconnected phone number, Maloof didn’t know where to turn. In the meantime, though, he started displaying Maier’s work on a blog, vivianmaier.com. Then, in October 2009, he linked to the blog on Flickr, the photo-sharing website, and posted a question about Maier’s pictures on a discussion board devoted to street photography: “What do I do with this stuff (other than giving it to you)?”

The discussion went viral. Suggestions poured in, and websites from around the world sent traffic to his blog. (If you Google “Vivian Maier” today, you’ll get more than 18,000 results.) Maloof recognized that this was bigger than he’d thought.

He was right about that. Since his tentative online publication of a smattering of Vivian Maier’s photographs, her work has generated a fanatical following. In the past year, her photos have appeared in newspapers in Italy, Argentina, and England. There have been exhibitions in Denmark and Norway, and a showing is scheduled to open in January at the Chicago Cultural Center. Few of the pictures had ever been seen before by anyone other than Maier herself, and Maloof has only scratched the surface of what she left behind. He estimates that he’s acquired 100,000 of her negatives, and another interested collector, Jeff Goldstein, has 12,000 more (some of them displayed at vivianmaierphotography.com). Most of Maier’s photos are black and white, and many feature unposed or casual shots of people caught in action—passing moments that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion. And Maier apparently ranged far and wide with her camera—there are negatives from Los Angeles, Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, the American Southwest. The astonishing breadth and depth of Maier’s work led Maloof to pursue two questions, as alluring in their way as her captivating photographs: Who was Vivian Maier, and what explains her extraordinary vision?

Filing away negatives one day, Maloof, who today is 29, found a promising lead: Stuck to the bottom of a shoebox was a Highland Park address for someone named Avron Gensburg. Another quick Google search pulled up a related address with the names John and Lane—the same names as two of the people mentioned in Maier’s death notice. A little more sleuthing revealed that from 1956 to 1972, Maier had lived with Avron and Nancy Gensburg in Highland Park as a nanny for their three boys: John, Lane, and Matthew.

Today, Lane Gensburg, a 54-year-old tax attorney, is the citadel of Maier’s memory, and he is adamant that nothing unflattering be said about the woman who raised him from birth. When he starts talking about Maier, his eyes soften. “She was like Mary Poppins,” he tells me. “She had an amazing ability to relate to children.”

Maier had answered the Gensburgs’ ad seeking a nanny in 1956, and when she arrived, she almost looked the part of Mary Poppins. Under a heavy coat, she wore sturdy shoes and a long skirt with a lace slip, and she carried an enormous carpetbag. “She was dressed so differently,” recalls Nancy Gensburg. Maier was tall—five feet eight—but she appeared taller. “A very classy lady,” Nancy says. Maier’s trademark was the camera dangling around her neck. She was also very French. “She looked French, quite frankly,” Lane says. “She had a prominent nose.”

Technically, Maier wasn’t French, though she spoke with a watery French accent. According to her birth certificate, which Maloof found buried in some possessions the Gensburgs gave him, Vivian Dorothy Maier was born in New York on February 1, 1926, the daughter of Maria Jaussaud Maier, a Frenchwoman, and Charles Maier, an Austrian. By the time Vivian was four years old, her father was out of the picture, for reasons unknown. She and her mother pop up in the 1930 census, but the head of the household was a 49-year-old Frenchwoman named Jeanne Bertrand, identified as a portrait photographer. In the early 1900s, Bertrand was a successful and award-winning photographer who had an acquaintance with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, an artist and the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Jim Leonhirth, a freelance journalist in Tennessee who is writing a book about Bertrand and other photographers from her era, knows nothing about Bertrand’s connection with Maier, but he confirms that Bertrand had steady work in a New Jersey studio around the same time that Maier and her mother were living with her.

Maier and her mother returned to France for long periods of time, but where they lived is not known. On April 16, 1951, at age 25, Maier sailed unaccompanied from Le Havre in northwestern France and arrived in New York ten days later. What Maier did in New York for the next five years—besides take pictures, which abound in Maloof’s collection—remains unclear, but it’s likely she picked up work as a live-in caregiver, an occupation she would keep for the rest of her life.

Even among the people closest to her, she could be elusive about her background. The Gensburgs aren’t sure what brought her to Chicago or when she arrived. She was more forthcoming with her insights and opinions. “She really wasn’t interested in being a nanny at all,” Nancy Gensburg says. “But she didn’t know how to do anything else.”

The Gensburg boys adored Maier’s knack for creating quirky adventures. She wanted them to explore life beyond the confined suburbia of Highland Park—“the sticks,” as she put it. Maier and the boys might see the latest screening of an art film, visit the famous monuments of Graceland Cemetery, bundle up for the Chinese New Year parade, or forage for wild strawberries in a forest preserve—one of Maier’s favorite activities.

After one particular trip to the city with the boys, Maier returned to Highland Park in a state. While on the train, Lane had gestured out the window to the apartments along the el. “Look, Vivian!” he said. “The closets are hanging outside!” He had never seen clothes drying on a line. “Do you really think everybody has a dryer and a washer, Lane?” Maier asked. The little boy nodded. “That’s just terrible,” she told their mother later.

“She wanted them to be very aware of what was going on in the world,” Nancy Gensburg says.

On her days off, Maier would take a spin on her moped or go to the movies. If someone famous was in town—President Kennedy or Eleanor Roosevelt, for example—she’d pack up her cameras, work her way through the crowd, and snap a souvenir. Other days, she’d lock herself in her private bathroom, which she’d converted to a darkroom. “We could never get in,” recalls Avron Gensburg, the retired head of an arcade game manufacturer. “Not that we wanted to.” Maier didn’t talk about meeting up with friends, and there was no evidence of a boyfriend, let alone a husband. (To those who made the mistake of calling her Mrs. Maier, she’d respond tartly, “It’s Miss Maier, and I’m proud of it.”)

Maier collected things—or perhaps it’s equally true to say she had trouble throwing things away. Negatives, cameras, clothes, shoes, tape recordings, documents—Maloof’s attic is now a cluttered repository. She had an especially weak spot for newspapers. In her little bathroom at the Gensburgs’, the stack of papers on the back of her toilet reached the ceiling. However, “she didn’t keep papers just to keep papers,” Nancy Gensburg points out. “There was always an article that she’d want to get back to and couldn’t.”

For six months from 1959 to 1960, Maier circumnavigated the globe alone. Although she never talked about her family, Avron Gensburg recalls that Maier inherited part of a small farm in Alsace, and it appears that she sold her share and used the money to travel to Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Beijing, Egypt, Italy, France, and New York. “If she wanted to go, she’d just get up and go,” Nancy recalls. The family would hire a temporary replacement while Maier was away; she never said where she was headed. “You really wouldn’t ask her about it at all,” Nancy says. “I mean, you could, but . . .” Her voice trails off. “She was private. Period.”

Maier would share some of her photographs of the children with the Gensburgs, but she wouldn’t gift them. “If you wanted a picture,” Nancy says, “you had to buy it.” But Maier wasn’t selling her photography for profit. “Someone had to want it more than she wanted it. It’s like an artist who would paint something and then hate to get rid of it. She loved everything she did.”

When Maier left the Gensburgs’ employ in 1972—by then, the boys were old enough not to need a nanny—she took everything she owned and didn’t mention her subsequent jobs, not even when she’d stop by later to visit the boys. Despite the gaps in her timeline, it seems she never strayed very far from the North Shore; she always managed to land in another house in need of a nanny.

One belonged to Phil Donahue. After he moved his TV talk show to Chicago in 1974, he separated from his wife, and a divorce followed. He and his four boys ended up in Winnetka. “There was no Aunt Bee,” Donahue recalls, referring to the iconic caregiver from The Andy Griffith Show. “The women who came into my life as nannies didn’t last too long. No matter who they were, the kids hated them. They were rent-a-mothers.”

Maier lived with Donahue for less than a year, and his children, as well as a couple of his nieces, don’t share the Gensburgs’ memories of her as Mary Poppins incarnate. She was the eccentric French­woman who dragged them to obscure monuments, served them yucky peanut butter sandwiches with apricots, and made the girls a present of a paper bag full of green army men.

Donahue’s youngest son, James, who was around 12 at the time, remembers that Maier would roam the neighborhood taking odd photographs in a getup that reminded him of Maria von Trapp, the only other European woman he had met at the time. (Von Trapp had made an appearance on Donahue.) Maier would startle easily and exclaim, “Oh! Bah la-la bah!”—an expression that can be heard on audiotapes she made of interviews she conducted with the children or elderly people under her care. On those recordings, she dodges questions about herself.

Donahue recalls that Maier took pictures, but he doesn’t remember any prints. “I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can,” he says. “I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”

Over the years, her subject matter changed. She stopped shooting in black and white, and her work became more abstract—artfully placed garbage, for example. There were no more pictures of the pyramids; she no longer made exotic trips. And she seemed to grow even more elusive—she would go long periods, sometimes years, without checking in with the Gensburgs.

By the time she arrived at the busy Glenview home of Zalman and Karen Usiskin in 1987, Maier was hauling around 30 years’ worth of photography. When she interviewed with Zalman, a mathematics professor at the University of Chicago, and Karen, a textbook editor, she made one thing clear: “I have to tell you that I come with my life, and my life is in boxes,” she said. No problem, they told her. They have a large garage. “We had no idea,” Zalman says. “She came with 200 boxes.” The family placed them in storage, and they sat untouched until Maier left a year later.

The Usiskins say Maier was good with their two children, but they heard she was less than kind to the taxi drivers on her trips to do the family’s grocery shopping. (She never learned to drive.) Back at home, she’d set aside all the bruised fruit, which she’d bought especially for herself. “If we would have a piece of meat [at dinner],” Karen says, “she would eat all the fat off of it—like somebody who was looking for calories to stay alive.” Karen surmises that Maier wasn’t comfortable buying expensive things. “I think that she had a real identity with being a poor person,” she says. “That was something that she was proud of.”

From 1989 to 1993, Maier cared for the disabled daughter of Federico Bayleander in his Wilmette home, and the stories about her start repeating: She was good with his daughter. She stored hundreds of boxes in his basement. She enjoyed critiquing movies and passionate conversations about politics. Neighbors complained that she was rude on the telephone. And there was something distinctive about her walk—a determined and heavy-footed gait, her arms swinging in large strokes.

After Bayleander, there was an employer in Oak Park and eventually a move to a cheap apartment in Cicero. When Lane Gensburg and his younger brother, Matthew, reconnected with her in the late nineties, they insisted on putting her up in a nice apartment in Rogers Park. “We were comfortable as long as we knew where she was,” Lane says.

He believes Maier was living off Social Security before his family stepped in to help, but she apparently had other sources of income. Today, Maloof can reach into almost any of her boxes and pull out a dozen stock certificates or uncashed refund checks from the Department of the Treasury, some of them for more than a thousand dollars.

The Gensburgs worried about her. Fearless as ever, Maier would walk around late at night in the more unsavory parts of Chicago and chat up the homeless under the el, giving advice or directing them to a shelter.

Around Christmas in 2008, Maier slipped on some ice while walking downtown, hit her head, and ended up in the emergency room. “We thought she was going to make a full recovery,” Lane says.

The Gensburg sons called in the best doctors and later moved her to a nursing home in Oak Park, where they would visit her after work. On the way to one of their visits, Lane and Matthew picked up their mother and grilled her: “Did you bring The New York Times for Vivian? Should we get her some coffee ice cream? She loves coffee ice cream.” Nancy muses, “They knew everything about her. She was just a unique person. But she didn’t think anything of herself.”

Maier passed away at the Oak Park nursing home on April 20, 2009. The Gensburg sons scattered her ashes in the forest where they all had found joy together picking wild strawberries.

When I first visit his two-flat, I’m blown away by the sheer amount of stuff Maloof has acquired. Upstairs is Vivian Central. By Maloof’s rough estimate, he now owns more than half a dozen of her cameras, more than a hundred 8 mm movies, 3,000 prints, 2,000 rolls of film, and 100,000 negatives. Steamer trunks and boxes line an attic wall. He pops open a trunk bursting with Maier’s clothes—felt hats, baggy coats in muted tones, black shoes so heavy they could double as dumbbells. Many of the boxes contain newspaper clippings encased in plastic frames or vinyl binders stuffed with everything from movie reviews to obituaries. One headline catches my eye: “Fellow Veterans Honor Victim of 1995 Heat Wave,” on a story about Rodney Holmquist, who had served in the navy and died alone. Twenty veterans rescued his body from a pauper’s grave and reburied him with military honors.

Although Maloof has thrown out numerous boxes full of newspapers, he’s holding on to the rest of Maier’s belongings to search for more clues to her story. In late 2009, he ran into an old high-school friend, Anthony Rydzon, who had majored in documentary filmmaking at Columbia College, and Rydzon suggested they make a film about Maier. They had the time: Rydzon had recently lost his job as a stagehand, and Maloof had switched from selling real estate to reselling products on eBay. Today their movie project is on hold, but there’s talk that a professional documentary team might be interested in telling Maier’s story. The two friends spend nearly every day in the attic scanning Maier’s photographs, prepping prints for various exhibitions, and sifting through boxes for new leads on people they might interview.

The immense volume of the photos makes for a daunting archiving effort. Maloof estimates that he’s scanned only one-tenth of the negatives in his collection—and he’s barely glanced at the remaining 90,000. When he finds a particularly strong photograph, he posts it on his blog.

With the excitement online and the exhibits around the world (the Cultural Center show opens January 7th), there is ample evidence of the popularity of Maier’s work, but how much of that stems from the unusual story of Maloof’s discovery and the curious nature of the woman behind it all? During our interview, Phil Donahue—who knew Maier only as a nanny, not an artist—asked, “Is there a preponderance of evidence out there that these [photographs] are really special?”

Colin Westerbeck, the former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and one of the country’s leading experts on street photography, thinks Maier is an interesting case. He inspected her work after Maloof e-mailed him. “She worked the streets in a savvy way,” he says. “But when you consider the level of street photography happening in Chicago in the fifties and sixties, she doesn’t stand out.” Westerbeck explains that Maier’s work lacks the level of irony and wit of some of her Chicago contemporaries, such as Harry Callahan or Yasuhiro Ishimoto, and unlike them, she herself is often a participant in the shot. The greatest artists, Westerbeck says, know how to create a distance from their subjects.

Yet Westerbeck admits that he understands the allure of Maier’s work. “She was a kind of mysterious figure,” he says. “What’s compelling about her pictures is the way that they capture the local character of Chicago in the past decades.”

In any case, John Maloof has made it his mission to spread the word on his remarkable discovery. “I owe Vivian an honest effort to get her recognized as one of the great photographers of her time,” he says. “I’m only spending time on her story because the world is demanding it from me. The more I learn about Vivian, the more fascinated I am about this woman. She was a singular person, extremely intelligent, and her talent was extraordinary. I get great satisfaction in sharing it with the world.”

But Maier was an intensely private person. What would she think of Maloof’s mission? Wouldn’t she hate it? Maloof believes she wouldn’t mind because the world has moved on, and he lets her speak for herself. After a long search, he plays a recording from an interview she conducted with an elderly woman: “I suppose nothing is meant to last forever,” Maier says in her accented English. “We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel—you get on, you go to the end, and someone else has the same opportunity to go to the end, and so on, and somebody else takes their place. There’s nothing new under the sun.”

~ Nora O’Donnell · Dec 14, 2010.

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Writing the True Story of Vivian Maier’s Life

Biographer Ann Marks uncovered details of the reclusive Chicago photographer and nanny’s life.

The mystique of Vivian Maier, the reclusive Chicago photographer/nanny who found posthumous fame, shows no signs of losing its grip on the cultural imagination (see: Vivian Maier: In Color at the Chicago History Museum through May 2023).

But a new biography by first-time author Ann Marks — who became fascinated by Maier after seeing the 2013 Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier, produced by John Maloof, Charlie Siskel, and actor Jeff Garlin — suggests that a lot of what we think we know about Maier may be wrong. In Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny (Atria Books, December 7), Marks dived into exhaustive genealogical research, analysis of all 140,000 of Maier’s extant images, and other personal records to offer a portrait of a woman who “overcame tremendous family obstacles to lead a full, satisfying life on her own terms.”

We caught up with Marks, a retired chief marketing officer of Dow Jones and the Wall Street Journal, by phone to talk about some of the insights she uncovered. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Was there a particular aspect of Maier’s life or work that initially piqued your curiosity?

There were two things after I watched the documentary that I couldn’t stop thinking about. One was all the different adjectives that everyone used to describe Vivian. In the book, I kind of start off with that because they’re just such opposites. Some people thought she was nice; some people thought she was mean. Some thought she was old-fashioned; some that she was feminist. It was just completely contrasting descriptions. And I thought: How could I make sense of this? Why do people have different perceptions? And then the second thing was, I just couldn’t believe in this day and age, with all the digital records, that all these genealogists used their skills and time, and John and Jeff used their money to find out anything they could about Vivian, and they kind of turned up a little bit empty. I thought that there’s something so strange about that, and I felt like I needed to crack that, because everybody has a family, and I needed to find out where they were.

How long did it take for you to find that all these dichotomies really did come from a deep, tangled family history?

I spent about five years on the research, and then two years getting published. Everywhere I went, I found really interesting things, and then I sort of was able to unravel the whole family story and the France story. [Many believed Maier was born in France, but in fact she was born in New York.] I was able to find people in New York who knew Vivian, which was a huge part of cracking her story, because she was like a different person there. And that’s when she started photography. In fact, I ended up finding that her whole attitude about photography, her behavior, was completely different in New York. And so it really opened up new learning about her for sure.

What specific things made you understand that the popular narrative around Maier — including the idea that she never wanted to exhibit her work — was not necessarily the correct one, or at least the full one?

I uncovered some key things pretty early on. There was a reason for her to be secretive about her life. It wasn’t because she was an oddball eccentric. She had a really bad family life, and there was no benefit to her in telling these upscale families in Highland Park [where Maier worked as a nanny] that her father was an alcoholic and he was violent and her brother was in jail and in institutions and her mother was a narcissist. Her whole story was painful enough, but you would never want to expose it to other people, especially if you would be watching their children. So I find that her behavior was actually rational, when a lot of people thought it was very strange.

Talking to people in New York really changed everything, because it became very apparent to me that she did try to be a professional photographer. She was very open with her photographs. There’s one family in New York that has hundreds of vintage Vivian photographs. In Chicago, she’d give people like two at the most. So she was much more generous and open with her photography in New York. The aftermath of her traumatic childhood caught up with her, and it really changed her ability to share her photographs. You could very much argue that she’d wanted to be a photographer and show her work and was proud of her work and would have been just fine with what’s happening now.

What was the most profound discovery in all the research that you did that perhaps you hadn’t expected to learn?

There were a number of aha moments, but the biggest was when I listened to her tape recordings. Because I had a perception of Vivian just based on how people described her — even with the contrasting adjectives, you feel like there’s kind of a seriousness, a detachment. You just get a vision of what she was like. Well, when you listen to the tape recordings, she’s nothing like you think she is. And I realized that everybody’s perception was based on her physical presence, which could be off-putting, but she was actually warm and patient and nice and nothing like what we’ve come to think about her. So I just looked at her in a whole new light, and that’s when I really wanted to understand why she appeared the way she did, why she presented herself the way she did, who was the real Vivian, and how was that expressed, then, through her photography.

~ Kerry Reid · Dec 7, 2021.

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Frida Kahlo’s ‘Self Portrait with Stalin’ – 1954

Frida Kahlo, one of Mexico’s greatest artists and an admired feminist icon, was born in 1907. Her life was by no means easy, after dealing with the repercussions of and Polio in the form of a weakened leg and several excruciatingly painful operations after the nearly fatal vehicular accident at the tender age of eighteen. Her lack of mobility and ability to pursue a formal higher education is one of the largest reasons why Frida began dabbling in painting and using it to express her beliefs and draw attention to her views.

Her works incorporate both European and Mexican influences, the latter playing a substantial role in her painting style as the years passed. She pulls from the Mexican palate of colors and classical European sitting position in this portrait. Much like her other works, her feet are covered, a conscious and self-conscious decision to hide the stunted growth of her leg. She wears a simple red shawl and red skirt, influenced by her Mexican heritage. There is no intricacy in this painting, her hair is pulled up simply and arms folded, yet there is gravity to this work, it pulls the viewer towards it. Both the figures in the painting are looking straight ahead, their eyes follow you across the room and the varied expressions evoke a mixed reaction. The sheer size of Stalin’s portrait dwarves her frame, even though the skirt adds a sizable volume to her frame.

Her deadpanned look is quite different from the expression she normally paints in her other self-portraits. This seems expressionless from the lack of trying rather than the emphasis on the features. This makes one think that perhaps the time she has devoted to perfecting Stalin’s expression should be the focus of the painting rather than her. He dons an authoritative look, with his face at angle as if almost deigning the viewer’s presence important enough to glance at.

‘Self Portrait with Stalin’, originally called ‘Autorretrato con Stalin’ is executed in oil on Masonite. It is currently on display at the Frida Kahlo Museum in Mexico City. As a self-taught artist, the style in which she used to paint was Naïve Art, which was characterized by the lack of formal training of anatomy or principles and often had a rudimentary understanding of perspective and rendering. Some artists often tried to mimic the childlike and frank nature of this movement and therefore it also gained the name Primitivism. The minor change from reality in the way she uses anatomy in her works is seen in the way she paints Stalin’s features.

Unlike the partially scowling expression Stalin is wearing, Kahlo paints herself to be wearing a placid position and sitting comfortably in a relaxed position. Drawing references from her physical condition at the time, it was anything but peaceful. Straying from her unique style of over-emphasizing facial hair and androgynous features, she has not focused on the ambiguity, but rather given her own presence in the self-portrait less importance, a rare occurrence. Perhaps this is due to the lack of physical capability to work on intricate details.

Kahlo devotes a majority of her composition to Stalin, showing her devotion to the communist party and his leadership. Stalin is widely agreed upon as the second biggest mass murder in the history of massacres, responsible for the deaths of 20 million, above Adolf Hitler and below Mao Tse Tung. His name, meaning ‘man of steel’, a self-coined moniker reflects his undisputed and brutal reign over the Soviet Union for over three decades. Despite the political nature of her painting, she stills maintains a Mexican inspired color palette; using ochre, rust, brown and other earthy dark shades to convey her message. The background pulls from the same color family using darker shades to create depth and break the monotony. Unlike almost all her other paintings, this portrait displays a definite lack of precision and detail, which is attributed to the powerful pain medication she was prescribed during the time she painted this. Her ‘Self Portrait with Stain’ is the last painting she made before she passed away in 1954 itself.

The political aspect stems from her desire to “serve the Party” and “benefit the Revolution”. Without any context Kahlo would seem to be an active supporter of the communist movement, but her history with the party runs back a few decades. During her marriage with Diego Rivera, who was supposed to be highly possessive and jealous, Frida had an affair with Trotsky, another leader of the communist revolution. Stalin took a disliking to Trotsky and had him assassinated with an ice axe to the head virtually in Frida’s living room (Trotsky had just shifted out of her house to his own place nearby). This prompted Frida and Diego to flee to the United States. Twenty years later she is proclaiming her devotion to the man who murdered her lover, rather immortalizing him in her works. The votive nature of this work can be compared to an earlier piece of hers ‘Self-Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill’. She credits him with the series of seven operations on her spine, which saved her life and portrays him as the “Saviour”. Here Stalin assumes the role of the “Saint”. This almost makes her dedication religious in nature. This last work, speaks volumes about her dedication as an artist to her craft and how even through her suffering she continued to paint subjects important to her.

~ Kareena Shamsi, September 5, 2016.

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Frida proclaims her love in this self portrait with Stalin just before she dies

Stalin stands for 'man of steel.' Not surprisingly, he picked the name himself.

Stalin was a runt who got bullied in school, and then made up for it by becoming undisputed dictator of the Soviet Union and running the place with ruthless brutality for about three decades. His government sent millions to their death, into exile, or labor camps. Millions more dead from starvation. Most historians agree that with approximately 20 million victims, Stalin ranks as the second biggest mass murderer in history, behind Mao Tse Tung (40 million) and before Adolf Hitler (9 million).

Kahlo was a life long and fervent member of the communist party. She was married to the very jealous and possessive Diego Rivera, but had an affair with another Russian leader of the communist revolution, Trotsky. Stalin took a dislike to Trotsky and had an assassin kill him with an ice axe to the head.

Trotsky lived with Kahlo and had only recently moved to a nearby house of his own. The assassination happened virtually in Kahlo's living room. Kahlo and Diego fled to the United States.

Twenty years later, Kahlo seems to have forgotten about that incident and immortalizes Stalin in this self portrait. This was her last painting before she died. She had undergone excruciatingly painful operations in the past several years. The lack of detail in this final artwork is due to the powerful painkillers she was taking at that time.

~ Marguerite Elliot.

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Self-portrait with Stalin: a political and personal portrait of Frida Kahlo

In the vast and vibrant universe of painting, Frida Kahlo's work stands out for her emotional intensity and bold exploration of identity, pain and politics. One of his most intriguing and less known works is self-portrait with Stalin, a painting that combines political iconography with personal introspection in a surprisingly intimate way.

Completed in 1954, the year of his death, self-portrait with Stalin is a work full of symbolism and meaning. In the painting, Kahlo represents herself with Joseph Stalin, the leader of the Soviet Union. Although Kahlo never met Stalin in person, she was attracted to his ideas and joined the Mexican Communist Party in 1927.

The composition of the paint is remarkably simple, with Kahlo and Stalin represented in the foreground against a lush vegetation background. Kahlo represents herself in her characteristic self -portrait style, with her direct gaze and her frown. Stalin, on the other hand, is portrayed of profile, with a serious and thoughtful expression.

The use of color in self -portrait with Stalin is typical of Kahlo, with vibrant and saturated tones that give life to the scene. The brilliant Greens of the background contrast with the softest and most terrible tones of the portraits, creating a feeling of depth and dimension. The bright red and the deep blue in Kahlo's clothes add a touch of color and drama to the composition.

Despite its apparent simplicity, self -portrait with Stalin is full of symbolic details. For example, Kahlo's head is placed on Stalin's shoulder, a gesture that suggests a personal and political connection with the Soviet leader. In addition, the presence of a red flag in the upper right corner of the painting clearly indicates the communist sympathies of Kahlo.

One of the most intriguing aspects of self -portrait with Stalin is its historical context. Kahlo painted this work during an intense political activity in Mexico and worldwide. Although Kahlo was known for her commitment to communism, Stalin's inclusion in this self-portrait suggests a particular affinity with the Soviet leader and his ideas.

In summary, self -portrait with Stalin is a fascinating work that offers a unique vision of the life and political beliefs of Frida Kahlo. Through its artistic composition, its use of color and its detailed symbolism, Kahlo creates a painting that is both a personal portrait and a political statement. Although it can be less known than some of her other works, self -portrait with Stalin is a valuable addition to the Kahlo art catalog and an essential piece for any art lover interested in her life and work.

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The Attempted Assassination of Leon Trotsky (August 1940)

MEXICO – At approximately four o’clock in the morning of May 24, some twenty-five men under the direction of Stalin’s GPU penetrated the high walls surrounding Leon Trotsky’s house in Coyoacan, and riddled with machine gun slugs the bedroom where Trotsky and his wife, Natalia, slept. Robert Sheldon Harte, the secretary-guard on duty and member of the Socialist Workers Party, was kidnapped and murdered, his body thrown into a shallow pit filled with lime. Leon and Natalia Trotsky owe their lives only to their own cool-headedness in a moment of terrible danger and to a fortunate accident – the belief of the assassins that they had completed their assignment.

Trotsky had been working very arduously the day prior to the assault, and as is his custom on such occasions had taken a sleeping powder. He awoke hazily, thinking he heard the explosions of firecrackers with which Coyoacan commemorates the special days on the calendar. But the explosions were too frequent and they were not far away, as it had at first seemed, but almost within the room. With the acrid smell of powder, Trotsky realized that this was the attempt which he had been expecting for twelve years. Stalin at last had commanded his GPU to correct what he once termed his “major error” – exiling the leader of the 1923 Opposition.

Natalia Trotsky was already out of her bed. She and her husband huddled together in a corner of their bedroom. Natalia made an attempt to shield Trotsky with her body; he insisted they lie flat on the floor without moving. Bullets tipped through two doors of their bedroom, thudding in the wall just overhead. Where were the police who had been stationed outside the walls? Where the guards inside? Surely bound hand and foot, or kidnapped, or already dead.

The door to the room where Trotsky’s grandson Seva slept, burst open and a few moments later an incendiary bomb flared up around a small cabinet standing there. In the glare, Natalia saw the dark silhouette of one of the assailants. They had not seen him enter before the bomb flamed, but a number of empty cartridges within the room and five or six shots directly through each of the empty beds proved that this assassin had been assigned to make the final check, to still any movement that might still exist after the cross-fire from the French window opening on the patio and the door to Trotsky’s study. In the darkness of the room, and hearing no sound whatsoever now that the machine guns were silent, the assassin undoubtedly mistook the form of the bed clothes for the lifeless forms of Natalia and Leon Trotsky. He emptied his gun on those forms and fled.

The old revolutionists then heard what was to them the most tragic sound of the night, the cry of their grandson from the neighboring room, “Grandfather!”

Natalia found her way into his room. It was empty. “They’ve kidnapped him!” she cried. This was the most painful moment of all.

Seva, however, had awakened when the assailants machine-gunned the door opening from his room onto the patio, the bullets striking the wall barely above him. He immediately threw himself out of bed and rolled underneath on the floor. The assassins smashed through the door and as they passed his bed, one of them fired into it, the bullet striking Seva in the big toe. When they had gone, Seva called out, and then ran from his room, crying, certain that his grandfather and grandmother were dead. He left splotches of blood behind him on the pathway in the patio and in the library.

The guards who had been pinned in their rooms by bursts of machine gun fire across the doorways, now checked the patio. The assailants were gone. They had taken with them the automobiles and kidnapped the guard on duty, Robert Sheldon Harte. Outside, the police were tied, lying helplessly on the floor of their sentry house.  

How Did the Assassins Enter?

From the accounts of the guards, the depositions of the police on duty, and the subsequent confessions of some of the assailants who were apprehended by the Mexican police, the story of how the agents of Stalin managed to penetrate the walls is fairly clear.

Five policemen were on duty, three of them asleep. J. Rodriguez Casas, the officer in charge of the police detail since Trotsky’s arrival in Mexico, was home in bed at the time of the assault, according to his story.

The assailants, disguised as policemen, approached the two police on duty, shouted, “Viva Almazan!” and at pistol point bound all five. They then went to the barred doors. These doors are never opened at night except under most unusual circumstances and then only when the other guards beside the one on duty are awakened, unless he knows the person who asks admittance and has first checked to see that there is nothing suspicious.

Harte, member of the New York local of the Socialist Workers Party, had been in the household scarcely eight weeks. He had been selected for guard duty because of his trustworthiness and because of his willingness to take difficult assignments. His selection came as a grateful surprise to him. He was well known in the Downtown branch where he was a member of the Executive Committee.

The police on duty were themselves completely taken in by the disguises of the assailants, hence it should not be surprising that an American might likewise be deceived. It is quite possible, however, that among those who rang the bell at the door was one person known to Bob as enjoying the confidence of the household. The psychological effect of the police uniforms in conjunction with a few words from such a person: “Bob, these officials have a message of extreme importance for Trotsky,” could have sufficiently impressed Harte who had shown himself already to be of more trusting than suspicious nature. In this connection it is significant that one of the guards, also new to the household, levelled his gun on one of the assailants, drew bark the hammer, and then torn by indecision lowered his weapon. It is one of the rules of the guard to cooperate in every way with the Mexican police who have extended all possible courtesies to the household. One does not answer this courtesy with a bullet.

One of the police bound outside, Ramirez Diaz, reported that Bob was marched through the doors, protesting but not struggling, his arms pinned by two of the assailants. Despite contradictory versions by those who later confessed, and especially contradictory versions in the Stalinist press, Diaz maintained his story. Even after being held in prison for a month for questioning in relation to the assault, he declared before the court: “Bob was not mistreated by the assailants, because he went with them voluntarily, although held by the arms between two of them.” This story seems closest to the facts.

It must be added that it is not excluded that the assailants managed to penetrate or scale the walls in some way other than by the doors and surprised Bob from the inside.

Once within the patio, the assailants divided their forces. The house juts into the patio like the stem of a “T” with Trotsky’s bedroom occupying the middle of the stem between the study on one side and Seva’s room on the other at the base of the “T.” On the right hand side of the “T” is the south wall, on the left hand side the rooms of the guards against the north wall. Part of the assailants stationed themselves between the guards’ rooms and the house; the rest stationed themselves at the door of Seva’s room, the French windows of Trotsky’s bedroom; others went through the library and the dining room and forced the door to Trotsky’s study adjoining the bedroom. When they were posted they opened fire simultaneously, those on the left hand side of the house spraying machine gun slugs into the doorways of the rooms where the guards off shift were sleeping. The firing lasted three to five minutes. Some of the guards were able to return the fire, but apparently with no success, although that is difficult to determine since it is an invariable rule of the GPU to leave behind neither dead nor wounded who might serve to compromise the Stalinist organizations.

The assassins took the two automobiles, a Ford used for hauling supplies, and a Dodge. They left behind an electric saw, scaling ladders, rope ladders, drills, a defective bomb containing enough dynamite to have blown up the entire house, several untired incendiary bombs, one incendiary bomb which was broken on a lawn, destroying the grass, a third which was burning in the entrance to Seva’s room and which Natalia extinguished with blankets, suffering burns on her arm and leg.

The Ford stalled a short distance away, the Dodge was abandoned in one of the exclusive districts of Mexico City.

The tools which the assassins carried, together with the police uniforms for disguise proved that they had prepared well in advance a number of possible lines of attack – that they were not dependent upon the complicity of a guard as alleged later by the Stalinist press. Subsequent events proved that they had just as thoroughly prepared in advance a number of possible ways of placing responsibility for the attempt anywhere but on its author, Joseph Stalin.

 

The Mechanism of the GPU

Within the Soviet Union, the GPU, hated by the workers, feared by the entire population, feeds upon the workers’ state like a gigantic parasitic growth. It is the principal instrument with which the Stalin bureaucracy maintain, itself in power. With bribery, corruption, terror, prisons, firing squads it represses and stifles the people, hunts down ruthlessly any voice of opposition.

Outside the Soviet Union, the GPU as an instrument of foreign policy parallels the Comintern. But it is higher in authority than the Comintern and controls its policies and activities. Within the Central Committee of each national section of the Comintern sits at least one representative of the GPU. He is known as the agent of the GPU generally only to the secretary of the party, at most to one or two others of the more trusted members of the Central Committee. The rest can only guess his identity from the unusual degree of authority he exercises.

Within the national section, this highest agent of the Kremlin works at his leisure. He studies the membership of the party in co-operation with those members of the Central Committee who are aware of his identity. Through appeals to party loyalty, through open bribery, and especially through pressure upon those who are expelled from the party and thus cut away from friends, often deprived of a livelihood-sometimes deliberately with this end in view – he builds a national organization of the GPU. This organization is composed of the most daring, demoralized, and cynical members of the Communist Party. They are prepared for anything. They obey orders without the slightest question. They have limitless resources at their disposal.

The GPU enforces a division of labor in its crimes. Its direct agents carry out the technical part of the assignment. The press of the Communist Party, its orators, and its periphery of sympathizers and “friends” of the USSR serve as a protective covering for these agents, masking their activity, parrying aside any probing into their crimes. The assault upon Leon Trotsky furnishes us with a classic example of the GPU’s methods in plotting and carrying out a major crime beyond the borders of the Soviet Union.

 

The Moral Preparation

Since the arrival of Leon Trotsky in Mexico, the official Stalinist press and Stalinist-controlled press have carried on a campaign against him, endlessly demanding his expulsion from the country on the grounds that he is “an enemy of Mexico.” When Dr. Atl, a fascist journalist, was in prominence as a minor reactionary figure in Mexican politics, the Stalinist press attempted to link him by no matter what fantastic means with Trotsky. When the oil companies were expropriated, the Stalinist press charged Trotsky with being their “representative.” Lombardo Toledano, the attorney who heads the bureaucracy in the CTM (Confederation of Workers of Mexico), at a public meeting accused Trotsky of organizing a “general strike” against the Cardenas government – naturally without explaining what could motivate Trotsky to such action against the only government in the world willing to grant him the right of asylum. During the Cedillo uprising, the Stalinist press accused Trotsky of connections with Cedillo. Before the Stalin-Hitler pact, the Stalinist press accused Trotsky of being an agent of Nazi Germany. After the Stalin-Hitler pact, they accused him of being an agent of England and the United States. A standard charge was Trotsky’s alleged “interference” in Mexican politics; that is, his occasionally answering the calumnies of the Stalinists. This charge at one time received such prominence in the Stalinist press that President Cardenas himself intervened through an interview granted the newspaper La Prensa, characterizing Trotsky as a man of honor who had scrupulously kept his promise not to intervene in Mexican politics.

All these charges endlessly repeated, clearly pointed to a coming attempt to assassinate Trotsky. Again and again in the press of the Fourth International this activity of the Stalinist press was exposed as not simple literary exercises for its hacks but as nothing more nor less than preparation for an attempt at assassination. The Stalinists responded with gibes about Trotsky’s “persecution mania.”

 

The Physical Preparation

As this moral campaign against Trotsky went on in public, the GPU at the same time began sending some of its assassins and gunmen into Mexico, especially through the Mexican embassy in Paris where Bassols was in charge. Among them, for example, were the notorious GPU executioners in Spain, Mink of the American Communist Party and Vidali (also known as Sormenti) of Triest, who is now in Mexico under the name of Carlos Contreras.

The physical preparation of the assassination began at least last January as the war spread over Europe and the Mexican elections approached. In the tremendous events of the Second World War, Stalin hoped the assassination of Leon Trotsky would pass without furor. The Mexican elections provided the opportunity to cast the guilt upon the candidate opposed by the Stalinists. (Hence the cry of the assailants, “Viva Almazan!”)

When Hernan Laborde, del Campo and other leaders were purged from the Mexican Communist Party in March, it was upon the charge of “Trotskyism,” that is, not conducting a vigorous enough campaign against Trotsky. Up to that time they had done no more than raise the slogan of “Death to Trotsky!”

David Alfaro Siqueiros, Luis and Leopoldo Arenal, Antonio Pujol, who led the assault on the house, and David Serrano, member of the Political Bureau of the Mexican Communist Party, established a network of spies in Coyoacan, renting houses in all sections of the village which they used in some cases for only a few days. A former wife of Serrano, Julia Barradas de Serrano, with another woman member of the Communist Party, rented a room not two blocks from Trotsky’s house and began the task of seducing the police, carrying out their assignment with a thoroughness that matched the unvarying regularity of the pay they received from the GPU. They reported their progress from day to day to those higher up. One of the police, who became enamored of their unusually easy charms, gave them a photograph of the entire police detail as a “souvenir.” In their room after the assault, rough sketches of Trotsky’s house were found, apparently work sheets which had been cast aside in constructing an accurate plan of the interior.

The GPU attempted to buy the house which Trotsky at that time was only renting, thus forcing him to become through the timely help of friends in the United States a property owner for the first time in his life.

David Serrano, veteran of the Spanish civil war, who has all the earmarks of one who acts as representative of the GPU on the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party, set about to obtain police uniforms.

As the time drew near, the GPU even rented a partially abandoned cabin in the mountains, bought lime, and had a grave dug in the cave which served as the kitchen, a grave which the police are convinced was intended for Trotsky and Natalia but into which the body of Robert Harte was thrown.

 

A Nest of Assassins

For one reason or another, the GPU failed to draw a water-tight division of labor between its artists of the pen and its artists of the machine gun. Luis Arenal, known in the United States for his former connection with The New Masses, was a regular contributor to Futuro. Many of the sketches and drawings attacking Trotsky are unmistakably from his pen. David Alfaro Siqueiros was eulogized in Futuro, Lombardo Toledano’s monthly magazine, as “an artist of great prestige and of universally recognized qualities. Throughout America, from New York to Buenos Aires his work as a painter is appreciated. He is a man who honors Mexico. In any country in the world a person of this class is an object of consideration no matter what might be his political affiliation. In Mexico it is not like this. Lately he has been the object of arbitrary abuses by the city police.”

It was this painter whose qualities were not given due consideration by the city police who, donning dark glasses, a false mustache, and a uniform of the city police, headed the gang which made the actual assault. The above appreciation of Siqueiros was from the pen, apparently, of Alejandro Carillo, editor of El Popular, who threatened after the assault to have Trotsky jailed by these same city police for “defamation.”

Two others of the actual assailants were contributors to Toledano’s magazine Futuro: Felix Guerrero Mejia, and Nestor Sanchez Hernandez, the latter author of an article attacking Trotsky.

It is doubtful, however, that the main figures in the moral preparation of the attack, who are leaders in the Mexican Communist Party, such as David Serrano, participated as machine gunners. Still further removed from physical participation in the assault are such figures as the lawyer and “transcendental” orator Lombardo Toledano, whose job it is to function in the trade unions as a mask for GPU activity and an exponent of Stalinist policy without holding a membership card in the Party. Participation of these gentlemen disguised as policemen would have been too sharp a violation of a standard GPU rule. Nevertheless the pages of Futuro, El Popular, and La Voz de Mexico are filled with names of people connected with the assault to one degree or another.

 

The GPU Intensifies the Campaign

In the March issue of Lombardo Toledano’s Futuro, same month as the purge in the Mexican Communist Party, same month as the women spies were getting along famously with their assignment, all the Stalinist slanders were brought up to date and dumped into one article against Trotsky.

This article, appearing under the title, The Significance of Trotskyism,; was written by Oscar Greydt Abelenda, a professor in the Stalinist-controlled “Workers’ University” in Mexico City, a collaborator of La Voz de Mexico, in which he reported, for instance, a secret session of the plenum of the National Committee of the Communist Party, although he does not happen to be a member of that body. The article accuses Trotsky of:

Being the “direct organizer of foreign counter-revolutionary intervention in Mexico.”

Of having been recently “expelled” from the “tanks of the Gestapo,” (a) Trotsky’s connection with the Gestapo as brought out in the “celebrated Moscow Trials” having “never been disproved”; (b) the Hitler-Stalin pact having “placed in evidence that the services of Trotskyism had ceased to be indispensable for the Gestapo.”

Of having placed himself “as is logical” in the “service of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) of the United States.”

The article further explains that Trotsky was expelled from the Gestapo because of the “links he had made with Wall Street.” Trotsky, the article continues, finding himself expelled from the Gestapo had to seek a new boss. “For Trotskyism this was nothing new, since from 1924 it has been found in the simultaneous service of various spy agencies, such as the British intelligence service.”

The article ends with the Stalinist moral: “Today it is completely evident that Trotskyism, in Latin America, is nothing more than an agency of penetration, of confusion, of provocation, and of espionage in the service of the imperialists of Wall Street.”

Although it is more than two years since the John Dewey Commission exposed all these ancient and mutually contradictory slanders of the Stalinists along with the entire macabre stage show of the Moscow Trials as nothing but a monstrous frame-up, the agents of the GPU still repeat the old calumnies as if the new chiefs of the GPU were incapable of improving upon the fabrications of the purged Yagoda.

When Trotsky named Futuro and its editor Lombardo Toledano as having participated in the moral preparation of the assault and hence of being agents of the GPU, Futuro responded with the cry, “Defamation!”

 

Covering Up the Trail of Blood

No one acquainted in the slightest with the historic struggle of the Left Opposition against the corrupt Stalinist bureaucracy entertained the least doubt that the assault was Stalin’s epilogue to the Moscow Trials in which he slaughtered the entire old Bolshevik guard. It was merely a question for the police to determine the identity of the specific GPU agents involved.

In order to shunt the police investigation down a false line, the GPU designed two alibis: (1) that the Communist Party had nothing to do with the assault; (2) that Trotsky had organized the assault himself.

There is every indication that the GPU planned to kill Trotsky, carry away his body, and then maintain either: (a) Trotsky organized the assault and kidnapped himself in order to cover up fleeing to the United States; (b) Almazan or Diego Rivera organized the assault in order to bring about United States intervention in Mexico; (c) all these elements, all enemies of Stalinism from completely different points of view, organized the assault jointly in connection with the Dies Committee. Inasmuch as Trotsky escaped them, they turned this carefully prepared defense of the GPU assassins against Trotsky himself and tried to kill him morally where they had failed physically.

On May 25, the day following the attack, Toledano’s paper, El Popular, writing cautiously because of its intimate connection with the GPU and the uncertainty yet as to whether the police might uncover the actual assailants, maintained (a) that a full investigation must be made and the guilty ones punished “no matter what their political affiliation”; (b) that it was an “assault against Mexico.” The first declaration was made to clear Toledano and cohorts if the assailants were captured; the second declaration was preparation for the charge of “self-assault” if the assailants succeeded in escaping the police. The possibility for a campaign on the latter line was further prepared by the declaration that certain aspects of the case were “unclear and suspicious.”

On this same day J. Rodriguez Casas, head of the police detail, informed the woman who did the cooking for the Trotsky household, that in his estimation the attack was a “self-assault.” This version was later repeated by this woman to the police. This fact, however, was not made public until almost a month later. Other events since then have cast an increasingly suspicious light upon her role.

It was also on this day or the following, as nearly as can be determined from the confessions of some of the GPU agents, that Harte was murdered in typical GPU style, a pistol bullet in the base of the brain, another in the temple. The last of the GPU agents with him, according to the confessions, were Luis Arenal, the contributor to The New Masses, and his brother, Leopoldo.

Why did the GPU kidnap and kill Harte? They could have tied him up as they did the police. Was it to prevent him from naming the person who tricked him into opening the door! Was it to prevent him from possibly identifying the assailants later in a police line-up?

On May 27, El Nacional published a most significant story: “Trotsky Contradicts Himself.” This “contradiction” consisted of the fact that one of the daily newspapers had reported Trotsky and his wife as saving themselves from the assassins by throwing themselves flat on the floor, a second newspaper as saving themselves by huddling in a corner, and a third newspaper had reported that Trotsky and his wife did not always sleep in their bedroom.

By a remarkable coincidence, the mechanics of which the GPU can best explain, this same story appeared word for word that same morning in Lombardo Toledano’s paper, El Popular. It was clear that the principal assassins, those who could give the leads to the higher-ups who were directly linked with the Kremlin, had succeeded in leaving the country. The GPU now believed it had succeeded in turning the police investigation down a false trail. It is still not clear as to the exact GPU agent who inspired the police in this direction. A good deal of suspicion clings to the lawyer Bassols, former ambassador to France, who is a well-known Stalinist and roundly eulogized in the Stalinist press.

The GPU line of “self-assault” now began to be pressed through all the various channels of the Communist Party. At a mass meeting, a Stalinist orator, one of the leaders of the Party, declared it “self-assault.” The attack was likened by the Stalinists to the burning of the Reichstag by the Nazis in 1933. (The Nazis blamed the fire on the Communists, just as the Stalinists now tried to blame the assault on Trotsky – that is the real simile.) The Communist Party issued a statement, declaring the assault to have been organized by the “agents of the Dies Committee” working through the ranks of Almazan’s party, that the purpose of the assault was a “provocation” as “part of the program of the oil companies.”

 

Slander the Name of Their Victim

At the same time, in direct contradiction to its accusation of “self-assault,” the GPU began a campaign against Robert Harte, charging that he was the “leader” of the assault, that he had “betrayed” his chief, that is, sold out to the GPU.

But Toledano’s paper, El Popular, on May 25, had reported – from undisclosed sources – that:

”The policeman Arias declared that when the individuals dressed as policemen and soldiers entered the house, they encountered Sheldon, and three of them overpowered the Secretary of Trotsky, tying him, which provoked energetic protests which he formulated in Spanish. In order to silence him, they gagged him too, and threw him into one of the automobiles which they had left standing in the street.”

This description of Sheldon’s resistance is found in no other report of the assault except the one in El Popular. It would indicate that Bob put up a desperate resistance. Toledano, with his first hand sources of information, naturally was capable of giving an accurate account of these details.

Beginning with May 27, however, every conceivable type of vilification was launched against Harte in the Stalinist papers. It was said that he had a photograph of Stalin in his room at home warmly autographed by Stalin himself (a GPU slander which not even a telegram to the contrary from his father could dispel); in actuality he was not an American but a Russian who had just got off a boat from Russia a week or two before coming to Mexico; the references with which he landed a job with Trotsky were so fabulously good that Trotsky had not even checked them; his baggage was still plastered with Moscow labels; he was a typical gangster type; during the assault he ran about the patio in his pyjamas; he had been paid a fabulous sum for the betrayal; it was impossible to steal Trotsky’s automobiles without Harte’s connivance as he had control of the ignition keys (in reality they were always kept in the cars for emergency use); he did not come as an agent of the assassins but was bought by them in Mexico; he came as an agent but was won over by Trotsky and so only carried out a partial treachery; he acted as a driver of one of the automobiles which earned away the assassins; he was very nervous when he left with the assailants; he was very calm when he left with the assailants and spoke familiarly with one of them known as “Felipe”; he was completely in Trotsky’s confidence and led the “self-assault”; he was snug and safe in his father’s home in New York.

These slanders were the moral lime with which the GPU hoped to obliterate all the trails leading to the body decomposing in the mountain cabin. For several days, as a matter of fact, the Stalinists succeeded in disorienting the police hunt. Two of Trotsky’s secretaries were held for two days in jail for “questioning.” Two friends of the Trotsky household, one a refugee from Germany, were held for four days in Guadalupe prison. The chauffeur of Diego Rivera was arrested. The house of Frida Kahlo, former wife of the painter, was searched. Seemingly the GPU was forging ahead with its campaign of moral assassination.

 

The Turn in the Investigation

On May 31, Trotsky issued a statement to the press, declaring categorically that the police hunt had taken the wrong lead. He described the methods of the GPU and named Lombardo Toledano and David Alfaro Siqueiros as being able to “cast light on the preparation of the attempt.” In government circles it was reported that President Cardenas himself gave a sharp turn to the police investigation, a turn which brought phenomenal success in uncovering the criminals.

The Communist Party denounced Trotsky’s declaration as an “insult to the police.” Who was Trotsky to tell them where to look for the criminals? On June 1, Luis Lombardo Toledano, younger brother of the “transcendental” orator, sent a declaration to the press written impressively by hand in green ink: “For Trotsky the police of Mexico are a stupid police. They don’t merit any respect. Mexicans think otherwise.”

Apparently the GPU considered the blows of Toledano the younger insufficient to counteract the impression Trotsky’s article had made. The Stalinist hacks went to work. They labelled the assault “an international blackmail.” They protested the arrest of some of the members of their party. They called for Trotsky’s expulsion from Mexico. They asserted that the assault was staged solely to contradict President Cardenas’ declaration that there was no Fifth Column in Mexico. They dragged in Almazan, the war-mongers, the oil companies, imperialism, hatred of the Soviet Union. They even thought up something bright and scintillating: Trotsky is “an instrument in the Yankee war of nerves against Mexico.”

Harry Block, intimate among the highest Stalinist circles of Mexico, editor of a mimeographed news clipsheet distributed free of charge in the United States by the Stalinist “Workers’ University,” and the man considered to be the liaison agent between Lombardo Toledano and the old GPU careerist, Oumansky, now Soviet ambassador to the United States, wrote an article casting doubt on the reality of the assault. The Nation in the United States, with its usual deference for Stalin’s requirements in periods of emergency, gave prominent place to this GPU report from Mexico.

The Communist Party protested with excessive volubility the arrest of two of its prominent members, David Serrano and Luis Mateos Martinez, declaring on June 7 that the police had affected these arrests “after Trotsky made subversive, anti-Mexican, and extremely dangerous declarations.” Their wordy protest added: “Our party considers itself outside of all suspicion, since it is a revolutionary party which supports the government of General Cardenas.” The Stalinists later amplified this profound argument by declaring that obviously they were not guilty, “since the Marxist movement does not believe in terrorism.”

The question, however, was not whether the Stalinist organization is Marxist, but simply: Did the GPU organize the assault?

La Voz de Mexico, Communist party weekly, on June 9 came out with a double headline and a three column story: “THROW TROTSKY AND HIS BAND OUT OF MEXICO!” The article considered it “improper that a chief of police should permit a Trotsky to tell the police what they must do to discover the authors of the ’attempt’.” The reason for this concern over the “propriety” of the police seeking information from Trotsky as to who had machine-gunned his bedroom soon became apparent.

 

The Mexican Police Solve the Case

The police department of Mexico City on June 18 announced that it had solved the case. Twenty-seven members of the Communist Party were under arrest. Among them, a number had made complete confession as to their participation. David Alfaro Siqueiros, the man who was an “honor to Mexico” according to Lombardo Toledano’s Futuro, was named as the actual leader of the assault. Above him were individuals from whom he took orders whose names were unknown to the staff members of the GPU caught in the police net. Haikys, formerly in the Soviet legation in Mexico and Soviet ambassador to Spain following the purge of Rosenberg in the civil war, was suspected to be one of these higher-ups. Carlos Contreras, GPU assassin in Spain, appears in the same category. Siqueiros, the Arenal brothers, Antonio Pujol, all members of the Communist Party, had fled Mexico.

The Stalinist press announced the arrests without mentioning the political affiliation of the prisoners, except indirectly in the case of Siqueiros, formerly the “honor of Mexico” but now “mad,” “undisciplined” and a “pedant.” The false mustache and dark glasses were undoubtedly the “pedantic” touch to his use of machine guns and bombs. It is not clear why they called him “undisciplined.”

From day to day further confessions were obtained, especially from Nestor Sanchez Hernandez, one of the contributors to Toledano’s Futuro, implicating more members of the Communist Party. Leads from the confessions brought the arrest of the chauffeurs who had driven the automobiles. Some of the police uniforms had been found in the possession of Communist Party members and a pistol which had been stolen from the police guard as they lay bound on the floor of their sentry house.

Lombardo’s El Popular now attempted a desperate switch in line to clear itself of complicity in the assault, issuing a statement, “reaffirming our attitude in the Trotsky case,” that is, the declaration of May 25 in which they demanded an “investigation” and punishment of the “authors no matter what their political affiliation.”

The Communist Party, completely bared in its true hideousness to the light of day, lacking any shred of respectability with which to cover itself, was capable only of blinking its eyes in the glare of the most unfavorable publicity it had suffered since the exposure of the GPU assassination of Ignace Reiss in Switzerland. It issued a declaration in the June 23 issue of La Voz de Mexico that is almost a chemically pure refutation of itself and a proof which could not be improved upon of the involvement of its staff in the assault. Note the attempt to hang their case on Bob Harte, whose body they had covered with quicklime :

”The work of a gigantic and refined provocation against the Communist Party of Mexico and the workers’ movement has been exposed to the public light ... Numerous persons appear directly or indirectly implicated (!) among them David Alfaro Siqueiros, named as the leader of the attack. The responsibility of one of the intimates of Leon Trotsky himself, his secretary Sheldon Harte, has been made clear ... None of the participants are members of the party (?); all are uncontrollable (!!) elements and agents provocateurs ... Public opinion has been surprised by the fact that despite the manifestation of the force of the assailants and the facilities and complicities – such as that of Sheldon – on which they counted, neither Trotsky nor his assistants nor his domestics suffered any harm. This reinforces the affirmation made by us since the beginning, in the sense that the provocation, planned with such refinement as even to have as instruments ’communists’ of straw, [With enough bone and gristle to handle a machine gun, however – J.H.] was directed in order to provide a legal base for the attack against and repression of the Communist Party and other revolutionary forces of the country. The espionage services of the warring countries and the Trotskyist organizations which work in Mexico – all these filled with spies and provocateurs as is proved in this self-same case of Sheldon who, while the majority of the implicated have fallen into the hands of the police, has eluded them – [The GPU considered the lime had worked long enough to make this a safe affirmation; also note the word “majority.” This word is thrown in deliberately to cover the most important GPU agents still at large. – J.H.] could surely say much about who are the real organizers of the attack on Leon Trotsky ... We insist once more that it would be healthy for the country that Leon Trotsky, who has given pretext for a monstrous provocation against the Communist Party and against Mexico itself, should leave Mexico.”

Stalin, as is well known, has long considered the deliverance of Trotsky into his hands an alternative far preferable to the uncertainty of machine-gunning his bedroom.

 

The Body of Robert Harte

The insistence of the Communist Party on the complicity of Harte was the clearest evidence of his loyalty to the Fourth International. Early in the morning of June 25, this loyalty was confirmed in the grimmest and most tragic way by the identification of his body which the police had discovered in following up the clues provided by one of the Stalinist prisoners.

The GPU was now completely unmasked, not only as the organizer of the assault but as the murderer of Robert Sheldon Harte.

Since the discovery of Harte’s body, however, the Stalinist press has not lessened its campaign against Leon Trotsky one whit. On the contrary it has sought to extend the campaign into the Mexican courts. Toledano’s papers El Popular and Futuro have filed suit for “defamation” and La Voz de Mexico has announced that it will do likewise. Every issue of La Voz continues to demand the expulsion of Trotsky from Mexico and now includes in this demand his secretaries, who it declares are the “executive body” of the Fourth International. A lawyer, Pavon Fores, member of the Central Committee of the Mexican Communist Party, has been assigned to represent the prisoners Serrano and Martinez. In six hours’ questioning of Trotsky before Judge Trujillo in charge of the case, Fores attempted to revive the theory of “self-assault” and to insinuate that Harte had talked with Trotsky about the assault the afternoon before it occurred.

When Trotsky answered Fores, he answered this whole maneuver of the GPU: “These questions seem directed toward resurrecting the corpse of the theory of ’self-assault.’ It would be better to resurrect the corpse of my friend Robert Sheldon Harte.”

 

Preparation for a Second Attempt

The continued clamor in the Stalinist press is nothing more nor less than the preparation for a second, still better prepared assault by the GPU. Such a second attempt on Trotsky is absolutely certain. Stalin having suffered all the moral and political damage of guilt in the first attempt must now show at least that he is powerful enough to carry out his will. Where he spent at least $10,000 for the technical preparation of the first attempt, he will now spend incomparably more. Trotsky’s life is in mortal danger.

 

The GPU a By-Product of World Reaction

In the Stalinist press the three letters “GPU” appear so rarely that it would seem the hacks of the Third International scarcely dare admit to themselves the existence of this dread modern Inquisition. Among the workers of the world there is great reluctance to believe that on the body of the workers’ state an organization so horrible as the GPU could have fastened itself. This has lent the GPU outside of the Soviet Union a certain protective coloration of unreality.

But a glance at the still fresh scars on the walls of Trotsky’s house where the machine gun slugs struck is enough to convince anyone of the brutal reality of Stalin’s terrorist organization. A few minutes reading of the Stalinist press will further convince one that the GPU is very real indeed despite the absence of its name in print.

The GPU is a by-product of world reaction in the period of war and fevered convulsions as society approaches the era of socialism. In the last analysis the GPU is a foul discharge from the decaying body of capitalism where it rests upon the Soviet Union. It directs its terror against the Fourth International in the first line because it is thoroughly aware that the Fourth International is the only force capable of giving the world working class a program that will lead to a successful socialist revolution. The destruction of capitalism will bring with it the destruction of the GPU and the end of Stalin’s rule in the Soviet Union. Like the other Inquisition, the GPU will become no more than a memory of that savage pre-historic past before the economic structure received rational organization.

In the great task of building that future society Robert Harte fell as a loyal soldier in the vanguard of the revolutionary proletariat. He was not the first of Trotsky’s secretaries to become a victim of the GPU. He was the eighth. Before him the following heroes of the working class died: M. Glasman, G. Butow, Y. Blumkin, N. Sermuks, I. Poznansky, R. Klement, E. Wolf. But Bob was the first of the American section of the Fourth International to be struck down by GPU bullets. On one of the new fortified towers which have been constructed in preparation for the next assault by Stalin’s GPU, a plaque has been placed:

In Memory of ROBERT SHELDON HARTE 1915–1940 Murdered by Stalin

~ Joseph Hansen Internet Archive 2005.

Fourth International, Vol.1 No.4, August 1940, pp.85-91.

[impressivepress]

Meet Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century

The self-taught artist is getting her first museum exhibition in New York City, where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography.

Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.

Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.

Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof, who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives. A quick Google search revealed that Maier had died just a few days earlier. Uncertain of how to proceed, Maloof started posting her images online.

“I guess my question is, what do I do with this stuff?” he wrote in a Flickr post. “Is this type of work worthy of exhibitions, a book? Or do bodies of work like this come up often? Any direction would be great.”

Maier quickly became a sensation. Everyone wanted to know about the recluse who had so adeptly captured 20th-century America. Her life and work have since been the subject of a best-selling book, a documentary and exhibitions around the world.

Now, the self-taught photographer is headlining her first major American retrospective. “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work,” which is currently on view at Fotografiska New York, features some 230 pieces from the 1950s through the 1990s, including black-and-white and color photos, vintage and modern prints, films, and sound recordings. The show is also billed as the first museum exhibition in Maier’s hometown, the city where she nurtured her nascent interest in photography.

Born in New York City in 1926, Maier grew up mostly in France, where she began experimenting with a Kodak Brownie, an affordable early camera designed for amateurs. After returning to New York in 1951, she purchased a Rolleiflex, a high-end camera held at the waist, and began developing her signature style: images of everyday life framed with a stark humor and intuitive understanding of human emotion. She started working as a governess, a role that allowed her to spend hours wandering the city, children in tow, as she snapped away.

She left New York about five years later, when she secured a job as a nanny for three boys—John, Lane and Matthew Gensburg—in the Chicago suburbs. The family was devoted to Maier, though they knew very little about her. The boys remember attending art films and picking wild strawberries as her charges, but they don’t recall her ever mentioning any family or friends. Their parents knew that Maier traveled—they would hire a replacement nanny in her absence—but they didn’t know where she went.

“You really wouldn’t ask her about it at all,” Nancy Gensburg, the boys’ mother, told Chicago magazine in 2010. “I mean, you could, but she was private. Period.”

Despite Maier’s reclusive tendencies, the Gensburgs knew about her photography. It would have been difficult to hide. After all, she lived with the family and had a private bathroom, which she used as a darkroom to develop black-and-white photos herself. The Gensburgs frequently witnessed her taking photos; on rare occasions, she even showed them her prints.

Maier stayed with the Gensburgs until the early 1970s, when the boys were too old for a nanny. She spent the next few decades working in other caretaking roles, though she doesn’t appear to have developed a similar relationship with these families, who viewed her as a competent caregiver with an eccentric personality. Most never saw her prints, though they do remember her moving into their homes with hundreds of boxes of photos in tow.

“I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can,” talk show host Phil Donahue, who employed Maier as a nanny for less than a year, told Chicago magazine. “I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”

Meanwhile, the Gensburgs kept in touch. As Maier grew older, they took care of her, eventually moving her to a nursing home. They never knew about the storage lockers. When she died at age 83, a short obituary appeared in the Chicago Tribune, describing her as a “second mother” to the three boys, a “free and kindred spirit,” and a “movie critic and photographer extraordinaire.”

Maier’s mysterious backstory is a large part of her present-day appeal. Fans are captivated by the photos, but they’re also intrigued by the reclusive nanny who developed her talents in secret. “Vivian Maier the mystery, the discovery and the work—those three parts together are difficult to separate,” Anne Morin, curator of the new exhibition, tells CNN.

The show is meant to focus on the work rather than the mystery. As Morin says to the Art Newspaper, she hopes to avoid “imposing an overexposed interpretation of her character.” Instead, the exhibition aims to elevate Maier’s name to the level of other famous street photographers—such as Robert Frank and Diane Arbus—and take on the daunting task of examining her large oeuvre.

“In ten years, we could do another completely different show,” Morin tells CNN. “She has more than enough material to bring to the table.”

The subjects of Maier’s street photos ran the gamut, but she often turned her lens toward “people on the margins of society who weren’t usually photographed and of whom images were rarely published,” per a statement from Fotografiska New York. The Gensburg boys recall her taking them all over the city, adamant that they witness what life was like beyond the confines of their affluent suburb.

The exhibition is organized thematically, with sections devoted to Maier’s famous street photos, her experimental abstract compositions and her stylized self-portraits. The self-portraits, which frequently incorporate mirrors and reflections, amplify her enigmatic qualities, usually showing her with a deadpan, focused expression. Her voice can be heard in numerous audio recordings, which play throughout the exhibition. As such, even as the show focuses on the work, Maier the person is still a frequent presence in it.

“The paradox of Vivian Maier is that the lifetime of anonymity that has captured the public imagination persists in the work,” writes art critic Arthur Lubow for the New York Times, adding, “An artist uses a camera as a tool of self-expression. Maier was a supremely gifted chameleon. After immersing myself in her work, other than detecting a certain wryness, I could not get much sense of her sensibility.”

The artist undoubtedly possessed a curiosity about her immediate surroundings, which she photographed with a “lack of self-consciousness,” Sophie Wright, the New York museum’s director, tells CNN. “There’s no audience in mind.” There is no evidence that Maier wondered about her viewers—or that she ever imagined having viewers in the first place. They, however, will never stop wondering about her.

~ Ellen Wexler, Assistant Editor, Humanities · July 9, 2024.

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A riddle, wrapped in a mystery, inside an enigma

Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks. The story of this nanny who has now wowed the world with her photography, and who incidentally recorded some of the most interesting marvels and peculiarities of Urban America in the second half of the twentieth century is seemingly beyond belief.

An American of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction, Vivian bounced between Europe and the United States before coming back to New York City in 1951. Having picked up photography just two years earlier, she would comb the streets of the Big Apple refining her artistic craft. By 1956 Vivian left the East Coast for Chicago, where she’d spend most of the rest of her life working as a caregiver. In her leisure Vivian would shoot photos that she zealously hid from the eyes of others. Taking snapshots into the late 1990′s, Maier would leave behind a body of work comprising over 100,000 negatives. Additionally Vivian’s passion for documenting extended to a series of homemade documentary films and audio recordings.

Interesting bits of Americana, the demolition of historic landmarks for new development, the unseen lives of various groups of people and the destitute, as well as some of Chicago’s most cherished sites were all meticulously catalogued by Vivian Maier.

Afree spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.

Maier’s massive body of work would come to light when in 2007 her work was discovered at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest Side. From there, it would eventually impact the world over and change the life of the man who championed her work and brought it to the public eye, John Maloof.

Currently, Vivian Maier’s body of work is being archived and cataloged for the enjoyment of others and for future generations. John Maloof is at the core of this project after reconstructing most of the archive, having been previously dispersed to the various buyers attending that auction. Now, with roughly 90% of her archive reconstructed, Vivian’s work is part of a renaissance in interest in the art of Street Photography.

VIVIAN MAIER

“Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on.” – Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer born in New York City. Although born in the U.S., it was in France that Maier spent most of her youth. Maier returned to the U.S. in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny and care-giver for the rest of her life. In her leisure however, Maier had begun to venture into the art of photography. Consistently taking photos over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would further indulge in her passionate devotion to documenting the world around her through homemade films, recordings and collections, assembling one of the most fascinating windows into American life in the second half of the twentieth century.

EARLY YEARS

Maier was born to a French mother and Austrian father in the Bronx borough of New York City. The census records although useful, give us an incomplete picture. We find Vivian at the age of four living in NYC with only her mother along with Jeanne Bertrand, an award winning portrait photographer, her father was already out of the picture. Later records show Vivian returning to the U.S. from France in 1939 with her mother, Marie Maier. Again in 1951 we have records of her subsequent return home from France, this time however, without her mother.

Sometime in 1949, while still in France, Vivian began toying with her first photos. Her camera was a modest Kodak Brownie box camera, an amateur camera with only one shutter speed, no focus control, and no aperture dial. The viewer screen is tiny, and for the controlled landscape or portrait artist, it would arguably impose a wedge in between Vivian and her intentions due to its inaccuracy. Her intentions were at the mercy of this feeble machine. In 1951, Maier returns to NY on the steamship ‘De-Grass’, and she nestles in with a family in Southampton as a nanny.

In 1952, Vivian purchases a Rolleiflex camera to fulfill her fixation. She stays with this family for most of her stay in New York until 1956, when she makes her final move to the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. Another family would employ Vivian as a nanny for their three boys and would become her closest family for the remainder of her life.

LATER YEARS

In 1956, when Maier moved to Chicago, she enjoyed the luxury of a darkroom as well as a private bathroom. This allowed her to process her prints and develop her own rolls of B&W film. As the children entered adulthood, the end of Maier’s employment from that first Chicago family in the early seventies forced her to abandon developing her own film. As she would move from family to family, her rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to collect.

It was around this time that Maier decided to switch to color photography, shooting on mostly Kodak Ektachrome 35mm film, using a Leica IIIc, and various German SLR cameras. The color work would have an edge to it that hadn’t been visible in Maier’s work before that, and it became more abstract as time went on. People slowly crept out of her photos to be replaced with found objects, newspapers, and graffiti.

Similarly, her work was showing a compulsion to save items she would find in garbage cans or lying beside the curb.

In the 1980s Vivian would face another challenge with her work. Financial stress and lack of stability would once again put her processing on hold and the color Ektachrome rolls began to pile. Sometime between the late 1990’s and the first years of the new millennium, Vivian would put down her camera and keep her belongings in storage while she tried to stay afloat. She bounced from homelessness to a small studio apartment which a family she used to work for helped to pay. With meager means, the photographs in storage became lost memories until they were sold off due to non-payment of rent in 2007. The negatives were auctioned off by the storage company to RPN Sales, who parted out the boxes in a much larger auction to several buyers including John Maloof.

In 2008 Vivian fell on a patch of ice and hit her head in downtown Chicago. Although she was expected to make a full recovery, her health began to deteriorate, forcing Vivian into a nursing home. She passed away a short time later in April of 2009, leaving behind her immense archive of work.

PERSONAL LIFE

Often described as ‘Mary-Poppin’s’, Vivian Maier had eccentricity on her side as a nanny for three boys who she raised like a mother. Starting in 1956, working for a family in an upper-class suburb of Chicago along Lake Michigan’s shore, Vivian had a taste of motherhood. She’d take the boys on trips to strawberry fields to pick berries. She’d find a dead snake on the curb and bring it home to show off to the boys or organize plays with all of the children on the block. Vivian was a free spirit and followed her curiosities wherever they led her.

Having told others she had learned English from theaters and plays, Vivian’s ‘theater of life’ was acted out in front of her eyes for her camera to capture in the most epic moments. Vivian had an interesting history. Her family was completely out of the picture very early on in her life, forcing her to become singular, as she would remain for the rest of her life. She never married, had no children, nor any very close friends that could say they “knew” her on a personal level.

Maier’s photos also betray an affinity for the poor, arguably because of an emotional kinship she felt with those struggling to get by. Her thirst to be cultured led her around the globe. At this point we know of trips to Canada in 1951 and 1955, in 1957 to South America, in 1959 to Europe, the Middle East, and Asia, in 1960 to Florida, in 1965 she’d travel to the Caribbean Islands, and so on. It is to be noted that she traveled alone and gravitated toward the less fortunate in society.

Her travels to search out the exotic caused her to seek out the unusual in her own backyard as well. Whether it was the overlooked sadness of Yugoslavian émigrés burying their Czar, the final go-around at the legendary stockyards, a Polish film screening at the Milford Theater’s Cinema Polski, or Chicagoans welcoming home the Apollo Crew, she was a one-person documenting impresario, documenting what caught her eye, in photos, film and sound.

The personal accounts from people who knew Vivian are all very similar. She was eccentric, strong, heavily opinionated, highly intellectual, and intensely private. She wore a floppy hat, a long dress, wool coat, and men’s shoes and walked with a powerful stride. With a camera around her neck whenever she left the house, she would obsessively take pictures, but never showed her photos to anyone. An unabashed and unapologetic original.

PHOTOGRAPHY

All of the images that you’ll find on this website are not from prints made by Maier, but rather from new scans prepared from Vivian’s negatives. This naturally leads one to the issue of artistic intent. What would Vivian have printed? How? These are valid concerns, the reason utmost attention has been given to learn the styles she favored in her work. It required meticulously studying the prints that Maier, herself, had printed, as well as the many, many notes given to labs with instructions on how to print and crop, what type of paper, what finish on the paper, etc.

Whenever her work has been exhibited, such as for the exhibit at the Chicago Cultural Center, this information is factored in mind to interpret her work as closely as possible to her original process.

JEANNE BERTRAND

Jeanne Bertrand was a notable figure in Vivian’s life. Census records list her as the head of household, living together with Vivian and her mother in 1930. Jeanne’s upbringing was similar to Vivian’s – she grew up poor, lost her father while young, and worked in a needle factory in sweatshop like conditions. Yet by 1905 we can read about Jeanne Bertrand in the Boston Globe, being touted as one of the most eminent photographers of Connecticut. What makes this even more surprising is that Bertand had picked up photography only four years prior to that report. But, even if Bertrand was an early influence, it must also be noted that Bertrand was a portrait photographer. Vivian first picked up a camera in the southern French Alps in about 1949. The photographs she took were controlled portraits and landscapes. The odds are strong that Vivian might have been taught by Jeanne Bertrand.

In 1951, Vivian arrived in New York City continuing the same techniques she practiced in France with the same Kodak Brownie camera in 6×9 film format. But, in 1952, Vivian’s work changed dramatically. She began shooting with a square format. She bought an expensive Rolleiflex camera – a huge leap from the amateur box camera she first used. Her eye had changed. She was capturing the spontaneity of street scenes with precision reminiscent of Henri-Cartier-Bresson, street portraits evocative of Lisette Model and fantastic compositions similar to Andre Kertesz. 1952 was the year that that Vivian’s classic style began to take shape.

~ Maloof Collection, Ltd.

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Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, Revelation

Since the discovery and exposure of Vivian Maier’s work in 2009, this reclusive, mysterious figure—street photographer, nanny, visual genius—has been the subject of widespread acclaim and attention. From monographs to worldwide gallery exhibitions and the widespread release of a feature film (the second documentary produced about her life and her work), the attention that Maier’s story has generated is dwarfed only by the astounding quality of the photographs she left behind.

The film about her and her life and photography was nominated for an Oscar at the Academy Awards in 2015.

In July 2014, Jim Casper, editor-in-chief of LensCulture, spoke with Anne Morin, the curator of the great exhibition, “Vivian Maier: A Photographic Revelation” that was shown throughout Europe. Morin was also very generous to share with us, and the readers of LensCulture, 120 photographs from the exhibition.

Here is an edited version of the interview from 2014:

LC: What was your role in the discovery and eventual dissemination of Vivian Maier’s work?

Anne Morin: I first heard about Vivian Maier in 2011 and I have been very interested by her photographs ever since. A year later, I was in touch with Howard Greenberg, the gallerist responsible for Vivian Maier prints, and John Maloof, the collector who holds tens of thousands of Maier’s negatives. With their help, I developed a curatorial project and we showed it for the first time in Spain. It then moved on, to France—everywhere it went, it got a huge response. It is now in Ghent, Belgium and in the future will move on to Amsterdam, Berlin, Venice…

LC: Much of the attention surrounding Maier has focused on her mysterious, quirky personality, her psychology, her story. But outside of that, what are your curatorial feelings about her work as a photographer?

AM: Her story is definitely amazing but I have to work hard to keep it separate from the physical reality of her photographs. In terms of her work, I think she’s one of the top street photographers, ever. She has a key place in the history of the medium—right next to Robert Frank and all the other great practitioners. Her images contain all the specificity of street photography while also referencing the history of visual culture. This is no accident. She used to frequent exhibitions and museums as much as she could. She knew the work of Brassai, of Henri Cartier-Bresson. I hope that my exhibition helps place her work in the history of the field. I leave it to others to puzzle over her psychology, her motivations.

LC: As far as we know, she was completely self-taught, right?

AM: First of all, we know that Maier’s mother made some photos from time to time. As well, there’s a little story that when Maier was young, her parents split up and her mother took Maier to live in Brooklyn. There, they shared a flat with a French photographer named Jeanne Bertrand. As an artist, Bertrand was very close to the Surrealists and a key member of the French art world. Maier and her mother lived with her for 4 years—maybe this was Maier’s first brush with fine art photography? Still, by and large, no one taught her photography formally.

LC: How many Vivian Maier negatives have been discovered, to date?

AM: It’s quite difficult to say, in fact. But it’s somewhere between 120,000-150,000. The reason for that large range is that the recovery of Maier’s negatives is still ongoing. For example, there are 6,000 rolls of film that Maier didn’t even develop. There is damaged color film, which is difficult to restore. She also recorded her voice on cassette tapes, keeping a sometimes daily log of her thoughts and ideas. She left really a lot of stuff and we are still working hard to make sense of it all.

LC: Of the 120,000-150,000 negatives that have been discovered, how many have been looked at? Did you go through all of them to put together this exhibition?

AM: In short, nobody besides John Maloof has access to all the work—I make a selection of a selection which has already been done.

In the 1940s, she worked with a Brownie. Then, in 1951, she bought a Rolleiflex. Technically, much of her early work was poorly done or badly preserved (overexposed, damaged, undeveloped, ruined during the 30 years of storage). In particular, her color photographs have been the hardest to recover. John Maloof has worked with new chemical developers in an effort to develop and recover as much of her color photographs as possible but it has been very, very difficult. I wanted to include color in the exhibition but what you see is only a fraction of what she produced.

Besides the negatives, there are about 5,000 vintage prints that Maier made between 1965-1973, when she was living in Chicago. During those years, she was a nanny and living in the house of the family she worked for. She had her own bedroom and bathroom and transformed her bathroom into a personal darkroom. This was the first and last time she had access to a darkroom in her life.

Looking at these personal prints, it seems to me that she was much more interested in the process of taking photographs than in producing a physical image, a print. In many, many cases, after taking a photograph, the film would be set aside, undeveloped. She was obsessed with recording the world but didn’t necessarily need to see these recordings afterward. Her relationship with the world occurred through her camera, through the process of photographing/filming her surroundings. But once the recording was finished, she wasn’t as interested in looking at the result.

LC: What seemed to interest Maier out in the world? What was her eye drawn towards?

AM: One persistent tendency was her desire to take pictures of people on the periphery. She said that she preferred to shoot in poor neighborhoods because that’s where people are living out on the streets. In rich areas, she couldn’t take as many pictures because rich people stay in their apartments. And in the business centers, people moved too fast to be photographed. So, she spent most of her time in poor neighborhoods, photographing people like her—people outside of society, outside of the establishment, on the edge. There’s a strong connection between her and her subject. It seems like there’s a mirror-like quality in all of her portraits of these people, as if she were present in all her photographs.

Occasionally, she would make portraits of rich people. But these photographs feel very different. There’s something very aggressive about these pictures. She is very close to them and right in their face. It’s like she’s stealing something from them, rather than seeing herself in their image.

And of course, her literal self-portraits are a thread that run throughout her 40 years of photographing. She works brilliantly in this genre. In these photos, it’s where she experiments the most and tries to find her place in the world.

LC: When you were preparing the exhibition, how did you make your selection?

AM: My overarching principle when putting this show together was that I wanted to produce something that she would have agreed with. I wanted to look at her work carefully and prudently, conveying a balance between her portraits, her black and white, her color. I wanted to convey some of the specificity of her style without imposing my own interpretation too strongly. In other words, I didn’t want to take unnecessary risks and invent a Vivian Maier that does not exist.

LC: When you look at her color work versus her black and white work, you feel that the former is very geometric. Do you think that working in color improved her black and white photographs?

AM: Her color photographs focus on the musicality of the image, the forms, the density of the colors. She was really working in the medium of color when she took color photographs. In her black and white work, her focus seems to be on her subjects, the people pictured. She also took most of her self-portraits in black and white.

In the color photographs, the figures begin to disappear. I think the color work announces the end of her life. She’s about to finish making photographs and about to disappear from the world. As her identity is fading, we can feel that fading through the growing abstraction in her images.

LC: What happens next with this amazing collection?

AM: John Maloof is taking care of everything. He is developing the negatives, scanning and digitizing her already printed work, going through her non-photographic materials (audio cassettes) and so on. But there are always new photographs being discovered from the immense archive that she left behind. Every day there are new pictures.

LC: So for many years, we will continue to be delighted with new discoveries.

AM: Indeed—ten years, maybe longer! Her genius continues to shine upon us and grow ever brighter.

—Anne Morin, interviewed by Jim Casper

Editors’ Note: Anne Morin is the director of diChroma photography, which specializes in international traveling photographic exhibitions, as well as in the development and production of cultural projects. She is based in Madrid, Spain.

~ Jim Casper, editor-in-chief of LensCulture · July, 2014.

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The mysterious New York nanny who helped shape 20th-century street photography

For much of her life, Vivian Maier was something of a mystery. Her photographic talent went largely unrecognized because she kept her work a secret from most of the people who knew her, including the New York and Chicago families she worked for as a live-in nanny and caregiver. Maier only printed a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of images of bustling city life she snapped with her Rolleiflex and Leica cameras over some five decades, and showed them to almost no one, instead amassing boxes and boxes of negatives and unprocessed film.

Her fame came about posthumously, and only because the contents of her Chicago storge lockers were sold off at auction in 2007, after she had stopped paying the rent.

“Vivian Maier the mystery, the discovery, and the work — those three parts together are difficult to separate,” said Anne Morin, curator of the touring exhibition “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work,” which opened 31 May at Fotografiska New York, the American outpost of the Swedish contemporary photography museum.

The show, which runs through 29 September, does not attempt to unravel the puzzle of Maier’s life, however, instead focusing on the work itself, with more than 200 photographs on display, including about 50 vintage prints made by Maier. Morin places her work on the same level as that of renowned street photographers like Robert Frank and Diane Arbus, and worthy of a place in the history of photography. “Nobody doubts that,” Morin told CNN. “The work is strong and Maier had a marvelous eye. And in 10 years, we could do another completely different show — she has more than enough material to bring to the table.”

The exhibition is also a homecoming of sorts for Maier, who was born in New York to a family of French and German immigrants. She started capturing street scenes in the city as a young woman in the 1950s, first borrowing her mother’s Kodak Brownie box camera and then buying her own professional-grade Rollieflex, which she taught herself to use. Her confidence and skill in finding the right moment to snap the shutter is evident even in these early works, in which Maier zeroed in on the unique characters and situations that make up city life: Men snoring open-mouthed on park benches; a balloon from the Central Park Zoo floating to hide a doting father’s face as his baby reaches towards him.

But while Maier was known to use commercial studios in New York to have her film processed, she never seems to have made a serious effort to exhibit or sell her work. Maier’s return to New York as a popular icon is “a big thing not only for women, but also for all the artists who are working and are never recognized and never have the opportunity to be seen, to be shared, to exist,” Morin said. “It is never late to repair history.”

New York is “in many ways, the heart of photography history in America,” said Sophie Wright, the museum’s director. “So it’s amazing now to be in a position to be bringing Vivian back to that world. She’s a rediscovered, important voice of 20th-century photography.” Wright added that Maier’s photographs were taken with “so much thought and care and lack of self-consciousness — there’s no audience in mind. In a way, it’s pure, artistic expression for her.”

Maier’s name and work first captured the public imagination in 2009, the same year she died in Chicago, after the collector and amateur historian John Maloof shared scans of her work on the photo-sharing website Flickr. He was seeking advice on what to do with the thousands of negatives, prints and undeveloped rolls of film he had acquired over the past two years, after stumbling across Maier’s work at the auctions of her storage lockers.

Photographers and critics immediately remarked on Maier’s well balanced compositions, and her incisive and often humorous view of the people and places she came across, not just in New York, but also Chicago, where she moved in 1956 and spent most of her adult life, as well as the far flung locations she visited on vacations, from California to Europe and Asia. In 2011, Maloof published a book, “Vivian Maier: Street Photographer,” and with the filmmaker Charlie Siskel co-directed the 2013 documentary “Finding Vivian Maier,” which was nominated for an Academy Award.

A number of other gallery shows and biographies have also debuted in the years since— as well as a legal tussle over Maier’s estate, which is now overseen by Chicago’s Cook County Probate Court, and with which Maloof has signed an agreement to display and sell her work. (While Maier did not have any children of her own to inherit her estate, 10 potential heirs in Europe have been found among her extended family, and the court is looking into whether her brother Carl, who died in a psychiatric hospital in 1977, might have had any children.) The public’s appetite for Maier hasn’t diminished, however. When the current exhibition was on display at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2021, amid the Covid-19 pandemic, more than 213,000 people attended over its four-month run. The opening preview in New York on 30 May had over 600 visitors.

Despite her immense popularity, some museums have been slow to accept her work, even those that have major photography collections. Wright attributes this caution over Maier’s work to the fact that she did not make many prints herself. “There’s a reticence to be seen to be driving a narrative for the work that’s not the artist’s,” she explained, as well as a nervousness around the politics of her situation as a woman who was vulnerable in her later years. (At the end of her life, as her hoarding led to her losing caretaking jobs, Maier was believed to have been facing homelessness, until two of her former charges, Lane and Matthew Gensburg, paid for an apartment for her to live in, and later a nursing home.)

Maloof and the photography dealer Howard Greenberg, who represents his extensive collection, acknowledge the concerns around posthumous printing of Maier’s work, and during a talk at the exhibition opening, said that led to their decision to only create uncropped, direct reproductions from her negatives. In the show, there are many instances where these later prints are displayed next to the ones Maier made herself, showing how she chose to focus on certain elements in a scene.

Maier’s presence can also be felt in the exhibition through audio recordings she made interviewing the children she cared for to encourage their critical thinking, which were also found in her storage lockers. They are played throughout the galleries. But the most persistent reminders of the artist behind these works are the numerous self-portraits she took, often as reflections in mirrored and glass surfaces, or simply as her shadow cast on the ground or a wall.

“The beating heart of the work is the self-representation,” Morin said, and it is these works she sees resonating the most with today’s audiences. “Everybody says, ‘Oh, my God, Vivian was the godmother of the selfie.’ But it’s different,” the curator continued. Maier’s self-portraits are a stubborn insistence in declaring her independence and identity, at a time when women, and especially domestic workers like her, were ignored and marginalized. “She wanted to record that,” Morin said, imagining Maier as saying: “I’m here at this moment. No one will erase my face. I exist and I have the proof.”

~ Helen Stoilas · June 24, 2024.

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Understanding Heidegger on Technology

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was perhaps the most divisive philosopher of the twentieth century. Many hold him to be the most original and important thinker of his era. Others spurn him as an obscurantist and a charlatan, while still others see his reprehensible affiliation with the Nazis as a reason to ignore or reject his thinking altogether. But Heidegger’s undoubted influence on contemporary philosophy and his unique insight into the place of technology in modern life make him a thinker worthy of careful study.

In his landmark book Being and Time (1927), Heidegger made the bold claim that Western thought from Plato onward had forgotten or ignored the fundamental question of what it means for something to be — to be present for us prior to any philosophical or scientific analysis. He sought to clarify throughout his work how, since the rise of Greek philosophy, Western civilization had been on a trajectory toward nihilism, and he believed that the contemporary cultural and intellectual crisis — our decline toward nihilism — was intimately linked to this forgetting of being. Only a rediscovery of being and the realm in which it is revealed might save modern man.

In his later writings on technology, which mainly concern us in this essay, Heidegger draws attention to technology’s place in bringing about our decline by constricting our experience of things as they are. He argues that we now view nature, and increasingly human beings too, only technologically — that is, we see nature and people only as raw material for technical operations. Heidegger seeks to illuminate this phenomenon and to find a way of thinking by which we might be saved from its controlling power, to which, he believes, modern civilization both in the communist East and the democratic West has been shackled. We might escape this bondage, Heidegger argues, not by rejecting technology, but by perceiving its danger.

Heidegger’s Life and Influence

The son of a sexton, Martin Heidegger was born in southern Germany in 1889 and was schooled for the priesthood from an early age. He began his training as a seminary student, but then concentrated increasingly on philosophy, natural science, and mathematics, receiving a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Freiburg. Shortly after the end of the Great War (in which he served briefly near its conclusion), he started his teaching career at Freiburg in 1919 as the assistant to Edmund Husserl, the founder of phenomenology. Heidegger’s courses soon became popular among Germany’s students. In 1923 he began to teach at the University of Marburg, and then took Husserl’s post at Freiburg after Husserl retired from active teaching in 1928. The publication of Being and Time in 1927 had sealed his reputation in Europe as a significant thinker.

Heidegger’s influence is indicated in part by the reputation of those who studied under him and who respected his intellectual force. Hannah Arendt, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Hans Jonas, Jacob Klein, Karl Löwith, and Leo Strauss all took classes with Heidegger. Among these students, even those who broke from Heidegger’s teachings understood him to be the deepest thinker of his time. Although he became recognized as the leading figure of existentialism, he distanced himself from the existentialism of philosophers such as Jean-Paul Sartre. In Heidegger’s view, they turned his unique thought about man’s being in the world into yet another nihilistic assertion of the dominance of human beings over all things. He insisted that terms such as anxiety, care, resoluteness, and authenticity, which had become famous through Being and Time, were for him elements of the “openness of being” in which we find ourselves, not psychological characteristics or descriptions of human willfulness, as some existentialists understood them.

Heidegger’s intellectual reputation in the United States preceded much direct acquaintance with his work because of the prominence of existentialism and the influence of his students, several of whom had fled Germany for the United States long before translators began producing English editions of his important works. (Being and Time was first translated in 1962.) Arendt in particular, who had immigrated to America in the early 1940s, encouraged the introduction of her teacher’s work into the United States. Heidegger’s most popular if indirect significance was during existentialism’s heyday from the end of the Second World War until its nearly simultaneous apotheosis and collapse on the hazy streets of San Francisco. Late Sixties Be-Ins — mass gatherings in celebration of American counterculture — appropriated existentialist themes; Heidegger’s intellectual rigor had been turned into mush, but it was still more or less recognizably Heideggerian mush. Herbert Marcuse, a hero to the more intellectual among the Sixties gaggle, was an early student of Heidegger’s, and his books such as Eros and Civilization and One-Dimensional Man owe something to him, if more to Freud and, especially, Marx.

After the 1960s, Heidegger’s intellectual radicalism became increasingly domesticated by the American academy, where wild spirits so often go to die a lingering bourgeois death. His works were translated, taught, and transformed into theses fit for tenure-committee review. Still, Heidegger’s influence among American philosophy professors has remained limited (although not entirely negligible), since most of them are, as Nietzsche might say, essentially gastroenterologists with a theoretical bent. Heidegger became more influential, though usually indirectly, for the ways artists and architects talk about their work — no one can conjure a “built space” quite as well as Heidegger does, for instance in his essay “Building Dwelling Thinking.” And much of Heidegger can also be heard in the deconstructionist lingo of literary “theory” that over the past forty years has nearly killed literature. The result is that “Heidegger” is now a minor academic industry in many American humanities departments, even as he remains relatively unappreciated by most professional philosophers.

But Heidegger’s influence is not only limited by the lack of respect most of our philosophy professors have toward his work. More troubling for many both within and outside the academy is Heidegger’s affiliation with the Nazis before and during the Second World War. His mentor Edmund Husserl was dismissed from the University of Freiburg in 1933 because of his Jewish background. Heidegger became rector of the university in that same year, and joined the Nazi party, of which he remained a member until the end of the war. Even though he resigned the rectorship after less than a year and distanced himself from the party not long after joining, he never publicly denounced the party nor publicly regretted his membership. (He is said to have once remarked privately to a student that his political involvement with the Nazis was “the greatest stupidity of his life.”) After the war, on the recommendation of erstwhile friends such as Karl Jaspers, he was banned by the Allied forces from teaching until 1951.

For obvious reasons, some of Heidegger’s friends and followers have, from the end of the war to the present day, obfuscated the relationship between Heidegger’s thought and his politics. They are surely aided in this by Heidegger’s masterful ambiguity — for him it really does depend on what the meaning of the word “is” is. His admirers do not want his work to be ignored preemptively because of his affiliation with the Nazis. Heidegger, after all, was not Hitler’s confidant, or an architect of the war and the extermination camps, but a thinker who engaged in several shameful actions toward Jews, and for a time supported the Nazis publicly, and thought he could lead the regime intellectually.

This matter has come under renewed attention with the recent release of Heidegger’s “Black Notebooks,” which are a kind of philosophical diary he kept in the 1930s and 1940s and whose contents fill a six-hundred-page volume. In his will, Heidegger had requested that these notebooks not be published until after the rest of his extensive work was released. The notebooks’ editor, Peter Trawny, reports that they contain hostile references to “world Jewry” that indicate “that anti-Semitism tied in to his philosophy.” Careful study of these notebooks will be required to determine whether they in fact provide new evidence of Heidegger’s anti-Semitism and affiliation with the Nazis that is even more damning than what is already widely known. No one who has examined Heidegger is surprised by what has been reported. But the question still remains whether Heidegger’s thought and politics are intrinsically linked, or whether, as his apologists would have it, his thought is no more (and in fact, less) related to his politics than it is to his interest in soccer and skiing. In truth, it would be surprising if the connection between the philosophy and the political beliefs and actions of a thinker of Heidegger’s rank were simply random.

In fact, Heidegger’s association with the Nazis was far from accidental. One of his infamous remarks on politics was a statement about the “inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism that he made in a 1935 lecture course. In a 1953 republication of that speech as Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger appended a parenthetical clarification, which he claimed was written but not delivered in 1935, of what he believed that “inner truth and greatness” to be: “the encounter between global technology and modern humanity.” Some scholars, taking the added comment as a criticism of the Nazis, point to Heidegger’s explanation, following the speech’s publication, that the meaning of the original comment would have been clear to anyone who understood the speech correctly. But perhaps we should not be surprised to find a thinker so worried about “global technology” affiliating with the Nazi Party in the first place. The Nazis were opposed to the two dominant forms of government of the day that Heidegger associated with “global technology,” communism and democracy. In another of Heidegger’s infamous political remarks, made in that same 1935 lecture, he claimed that “Russia and America, seen metaphysically, are both the same: the same hopeless frenzy of enchained technology and of the rootless organization of the average man.” The Nazi’s rhetoric about “blood and soil” and the mythology of an ancient, wise, and virtuous German Volk might also have appealed to someone concerned with the homogenizing consequences of globalization and technology. More broadly, Heidegger’s thought always was and remained illiberal, tending to encompass all matters, philosophy and politics among them, in a single perspective, ignoring the freedom of most people to act independently. The ways in which liberal democracies promote excellence and useful competition were not among the political ideas to which Heidegger’s thought was open. His totalizing, illiberal thought made his joining the Nazis much more likely than his condemning them.

The study of Heidegger is both dangerous and difficult — the way he is taught today threatens to obscure his thought’s connection to his politics while at the same time transforming his work into fodder for the aimless curiosity of the academic industry. Heidegger would not be surprised to discover that he is now part of the problem that he meant to address. But if, as Heidegger hoped, his works are to help us understand the challenges technology presents, we must study him both carefully and cautiously — carefully, to appreciate the depth and complexity of his thought, and cautiously, in light of his association with the Nazis.

Technology as Revealing

Heidegger’s concern with technology is not limited to his writings that are explicitly dedicated to it, and a full appreciation of his views on technology requires some understanding of how the problem of technology fits into his broader philosophical project and phenomenological approach. (Phenomenology, for Heidegger, is a method that tries to let things show themselves in their own way, and not see them in advance through a technical or theoretical lens.) The most important argument in Being and Time that is relevant for Heidegger’s later thinking about technology is that theoretical activities such as the natural sciences depend on views of time and space that narrow the understanding implicit in how we deal with the ordinary world of action and concern. We cannot construct meaningful distance and direction, or understand the opportunities for action, from science’s neutral, mathematical understanding of space and time. Indeed, this detached and “objective” scientific view of the world restricts our everyday understanding. Our ordinary use of things and our “concernful dealings” within the world are pathways to a more fundamental and more truthful understanding of man and being than the sciences provide; science flattens the richness of ordinary concern. By placing science back within the realm of experience from which it originates, and by examining the way our scientific understanding of time, space, and nature derives from our more fundamental experience of the world, Heidegger, together with his teacher Husserl and some of his students such as Jacob Klein and Alexandre Koyré, helped to establish new ways of thinking about the history and philosophy of science.

Heidegger applies this understanding of experience in later writings that are focused explicitly on technology, where he goes beyond the traditional view of technology as machines and technical procedures. He instead tries to think through the essence of technology as a way in which we encounter entities generally, including nature, ourselves, and, indeed, everything. Heidegger’s most influential work on technology is the lecture “The Question Concerning Technology,” published in 1954, which was a revised version of part two of a four-part lecture series he delivered in Bremen in 1949 (his first public speaking appearance since the end of the war). These Bremen lectures have recently been translated into English, for the first time, by Andrew J. Mitchell.

Introducing the Bremen lectures, Heidegger observes that because of technology, “all distances in time and space are shrinking” and “yet the hasty setting aside of all distances brings no nearness; for nearness does not consist in a small amount of distance.” The lectures set out to examine what this nearness is that remains absent and is “even warded off by the restless removal of distances.” As we shall see, we have become almost incapable of experiencing this nearness, let alone understanding it, because all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside. Everything approaches us merely as a source of energy or as something we must organize. We treat even human capabilities as though they were only means for technological procedures, as when a worker becomes nothing but an instrument for production. Leaders and planners, along with the rest of us, are mere human resources to be arranged, rearranged, and disposed of. Each and every thing that presents itself technologically thereby loses its distinctive independence and form. We push aside, obscure, or simply cannot see, other possibilities.

Common attempts to rectify this situation don’t solve the problem and instead are part of it. We tend to believe that technology is a means to our ends and a human activity under our control. But in truth we now conceive of means, ends, and ourselves as fungible and manipulable. Control and direction are technological control and direction. Our attempts to master technology still remain within its walls, reinforcing them. As Heidegger says in the third of his Bremen lectures, “all this opining concerning technology” — the common critique of technology that denounces its harmful effects, as well as the belief that technology is nothing but a blessing, and especially the view that technology is a neutral tool to be wielded either for good or evil — all of this only shows “how the dominance of the essence of technology orders into its plundering even and especially the human conceptions concerning technology.” This is because “with all these conceptions and valuations one is from the outset unwittingly in agreement that technology would be a means to an end.” This “instrumental” view of technology is correct, but it “does not show us technology’s essence.” It is correct because it sees something pertinent about technology, but it is essentially misleading and not true because it does not see how technology is a way that all entities, not merely machines and technical processes, now present themselves.

Of course, were there no way out of technological thinking, Heidegger’s own standpoint, however sophisticated, would also be trapped within it. He attempts to show a way out — a way to think about technology that is not itself beholden to technology. This leads us into a realm that will be familiar to those acquainted with Heidegger’s work on “being,” the central issue in Being and Time and one that is also prominent in some of the Bremen lectures. The basic phenomenon that belongs together with being is truth, or “revealing,” which is the phenomenon Heidegger brings forward in his discussion in “The Question Concerning Technology.” Things can show or reveal themselves to us in different ways, and it is attention to this that will help us recognize that technology is itself one of these ways, but only one. Other kinds of revealing, and attention to the realm of truth and being as such, will allow us to “experience the technological within its own bounds.”

Only then will “another whole realm for the essence of technology … open itself up to us. It is the realm of revealing, i.e., of truth.” Placing ourselves back in this realm avoids the reduction of things and of ourselves to mere supplies and reserves. This step, however, does not guarantee that we will fully enter, live within, or experience this realm. Nor can we predict what technology’s fate or ours will be once we do experience it. We can at most say that older and more enduring ways of thought and experience might be reinvigorated and re-inspired. Heidegger believes his work to be preparatory, illuminating ways of being and of being human that are not merely technological.

One way by which Heidegger believes he can enter this realm is by attending to the original meaning of crucial words and the phenomena they reveal. Original language — words that precede explicit philosophical, technological, and scientific thought and sometimes survive in colloquial speech — often shows what is true more tellingly than modern speech does. (Some poets are for Heidegger better guides on the quest for truth than professional philosophers.) The two decisive languages, Heidegger thinks, are Greek and German; Greek because our philosophical heritage derives its terms from it (often in distorted form), and German, because its words can often be traced to an origin undistorted by philosophical reflection or by Latin interpretations of the Greek. (Some critics believe that Heidegger’s reliance on what they think are fanciful etymologies warps his understanding.)

Much more worrisome, however, is that Heidegger’s thought, while promising a comprehensive view of the essence of technology, by virtue of its inclusiveness threatens to blur distinctions that are central to human concerns. Moreover, his emphasis on technology’s broad and uncanny scope ignores or occludes the importance and possibility of ethical and political choice. This twofold problem is most evident in the best-known passage from the second Bremen lecture: “Agriculture is now a mechanized food industry, in essence the same as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and extermination camps, the same as the blockading and starving of countries, the same as the production of hydrogen bombs.” From what standpoint could mechanized agriculture and the Nazis’ extermination camps be “in essence the same”? If there is such a standpoint, should it not be ignored or at least modified because it overlooks or trivializes the most significant matters of choice, in this case the ability to detect and deal with grave injustice? Whatever the full and subtle meaning of “in essence the same” is, Heidegger fails to address the difference in ethical weight between the two phenomena he compares, or to show a path for just political choice. While Heidegger purports to attend to concrete, ordinary experience, he does not consider seriously justice and injustice as fundamental aspects of this experience. Instead, Heidegger claims that what is “horrifying” is not any of technology’s particular harmful effects but “what transposes … all that is out of its previous essence” — that is to say, what is dangerous is that technology displaces beings from what they originally were, hindering our ability to experience them truly.

What Is the Essence of Technology?

Let us now follow Heidegger’s understanding of technology more exactingly, relying on the Bremen lectures and “The Question Concerning Technology,” and beginning with four points of Heidegger’s critique (some of which we have already touched on).

First, the essence of technology is not something we make; it is a mode of being, or of revealing. This means that technological things have their own novel kind of presence, endurance, and connections among parts and wholes. They have their own way of presenting themselves and the world in which they operate. The essence of technology is, for Heidegger, not the best or most characteristic instance of technology, nor is it a nebulous generality, a form or idea. Rather, to consider technology essentially is to see it as an event to which we belong: the structuring, ordering, and “requisitioning” of everything around us, and of ourselves. The second point is that technology even holds sway over beings that we do not normally think of as technological, such as gods and history. Third, the essence of technology as Heidegger discusses it is primarily a matter of modern and industrial technology. He is less concerned with the ancient and old tools and techniques that antedate modernity; the essence of technology is revealed in factories and industrial processes, not in hammers and plows. And fourth, for Heidegger, technology is not simply the practical application of natural science. Instead, modern natural science can understand nature in the characteristically scientific manner only because nature has already, in advance, come to light as a set of calculable, orderable forces — that is to say, technologically.

Some concrete examples from Heidegger’s writings will help us develop these themes. When Heidegger says that technology reveals things to us as “standing reserve,” he means that everything is imposed upon or “challenged” to be an orderly resource for technical application, which in turn we take as a resource for further use, and so on interminably. For example, we challenge land to yield coal, treating the land as nothing but a coal reserve. The coal is then stored, “on call, ready to deliver the sun’s warmth that is stored in it,” which is then “challenged forth for heat, which in turn is ordered to deliver steam whose pressure turns the wheels that keep a factory running.” The factories are themselves challenged to produce tools “through which once again machines are set to work and maintained.”

The passive voice in this account indicates that these acts occur not primarily by our own doing; we belong to the activity. Technological conscriptions of things occur in a sense prior to our actual technical use of them, because things must be (and be seen as) already available resources in order for them to be used in this fashion. This availability makes planning for technical ends possible; it is the heart of what in the Sixties and Seventies was called the inescapable “system.” But these technical ends are never ends in themselves: “A success is that type of consequence that itself remains assigned to the yielding of further consequences.” This chain does not move toward anything that has its own presence, but, instead, “only enters into its circuit,” and is “regulating and securing” natural resources and energies in this never-ending fashion.

Technology also replaces the familiar connection of parts to wholes; everything is just an exchangeable piece. For example, while a deer or a tree or a wine jug may “stand on its own” and have its own presence, an automobile does not: it is challenged “for a further conducting along, which itself sets in place the promotion of commerce.” Machines and other pieces of inventory are not parts of self-standing wholes, but arrive piece by piece. These pieces do share themselves with others in a sort of unity, but they are isolated, “shattered,” and confined to a “circuit of orderability.” The isolated pieces, moreover, are uniform and exchangeable. We can replace one piece of standing reserve with another. By contrast, “My hand … is not a piece of me. I myself am entirely in each gesture of the hand, every single time.”

Human beings too are now exchangeable pieces. A forester “is today positioned by the lumber industry. Whether he knows it or not, he is in his own way a piece of inventory in the cellulose stock” delivered to newspapers and magazines. These in turn, as Heidegger puts it in “The Question Concerning Technology,” “set public opinion to swallowing what is printed, so that a set configuration of opinion becomes available on demand.” Similarly, radio and its employees belong to the standing reserve of the public sphere; everything in the public sphere is ordered “for anyone and everyone without distinction.” Even the radio listener, whom we are nowadays accustomed to thinking of as a free consumer of mass media — after all, he “is entirely free to turn the device on and off” — is actually still confined in the technological system of producing public opinion. “Indeed, he is only free in the sense that each time he must free himself from the coercive insistence of the public sphere that nevertheless ineluctably persists.”

But the essence of technology does not just affect things and people. It “attacks everything that is: Nature and history, humans, and divinities.” When theologians on occasion cite the beauty of atomic physics or the subtleties of quantum mechanics as evidence for the existence of God, they have, Heidegger says, placed God “into the realm of the orderable.” God becomes technologized. (Heidegger’s word for the essence of technology is Gestell. While the translator of the Bremen lectures, Andrew Mitchell, renders it as “positionality,” William Lovitt, the translator of “The Question Concerning Technology” in 1977 chose the term “enframing.” It almost goes without saying that neither term can bring out all the nuances that Heidegger has in mind.)

The heart of the matter for Heidegger is thus not in any particular machine, process, or resource, but rather in the “challenging”: the way the essence of technology operates on our understanding of all matters and on the presence of those matters themselves — the all-pervasive way we confront (and are confronted by) the technological world. Everything encountered technologically is exploited for some technical use. It is important to note, as suggested earlier, that when Heidegger speaks of technology’s essence in terms of challenging or positionality, he speaks of modern technology, and excludes traditional arts and tools that we might in some sense consider technological. For instance, the people who cross the Rhine by walking over a simple bridge might also seem to be using the bridge to challenge the river, making it a piece in an endless chain of use. But Heidegger argues that the bridge in fact allows the river to be itself, to stand within its own flow and form. By contrast, a hydroelectric plant and its dams and structures transform the river into just one more element in an energy-producing sequence. Similarly, the traditional activities of peasants do not “challenge the farmland.” Rather, they protect the crops, leaving them “to the discretion of the growing forces,” whereas “agriculture is now a mechanized food industry.”

Modern machines are therefore not merely more developed, or self-propelled, versions of old tools such as water or spinning wheels. Technology’s essence “has already from the outset abolished all those places where the spinning wheel and water mill previously stood.” Heidegger is not concerned with the elusive question of precisely dating the origin of modern technology, a question that some think important in order to understand it. But he does claim that well before the rise of industrial mechanization in the eighteenth century, technology’s essence was already in place. “It first of all lit up the region within which the invention of something like power-producing machines could at all be sought out and attempted.” We cannot capture the essence of technology by describing the makeup of a machine, for “every construction of every machine already moves within the essential space of technology.”

Even if the essence of technology does not originate in the rise of mechanization, can we at least show how it follows from the way we apprehend nature? After all, Heidegger says, the essence of technology “begins its reign” when modern natural science is born in the early seventeenth century. But in fact we cannot show this because in Heidegger’s view the relationship between science and technology is the reverse of how we usually think it to be; natural forces and materials belong to technology, rather than the other way around. It was technological thinking that first understood nature in such a way that nature could be challenged to unlock its forces and energy. The challenge preceded the unlocking; the essence of technology is thus prior to natural science. “Modern technology is not applied natural science, far more is modern natural science the application of the essence of technology.” Nature is therefore “the fundamental piece of inventory of the technological standing reserve — and nothing else.”

Given this view of technology, it follows that any scientific account obscures the essential being of many things, including their nearness. So when Heidegger discusses technology and nearness, he assures us that he is not simply repeating the cliché that technology makes the world smaller. “What is decisive,” he writes, “is not that the distances are diminishing with the help of technology, but rather that nearness remains outstanding.” In order to experience nearness, we must encounter things in their truth. And no matter how much we believe that science will let us “encounter the actual in its actuality,” science only offers us representations of things. It “only ever encounters that which its manner of representation has previously admitted as a possible object for itself.”

An example from the second lecture illustrates what Heidegger means. Scientifically speaking, the distance between a house and the tree in front of it can be measured neutrally: it is thirty feet. But in our everyday lives, that distance is not as neutral, not as abstract. Instead, the distance is an aspect of our concern with the tree and the house: the experience of walking, of seeing the tree’s shape grow larger as I come closer, and of the growing separation from the home as I walk away from it. In the scientific account, “distance appears to be first achieved in an opposition” between viewer and object. By becoming indifferent to things as they concern us, by representing both the distance and the object as simple but useful mathematical entities or philosophical ideas, we lose our truest experience of nearness and distance.

Turning To and Away from Danger

It is becoming clear by now that in order to understand the essence of technology we must also understand things non-technologically; we must enter the realm where things can show themselves to us truthfully in a manner not limited to the technological. But technology is such a domineering force that it all but eliminates our ability to experience this realm. The possibility of understanding the interrelated, meaningful, practical involvements with our surroundings that Heidegger describes is almost obliterated. The danger is that technology’s domination fully darkens and makes us forget our understanding of ourselves as the beings who can stand within this realm.

The third Bremen lecture lays out just how severe the problem is. While we have already seen how the essence of technology prevents us from encountering the reality of the world, now Heidegger points out that technology has become the world (“world and positionality are the same”). Technology reigns, and we therefore forget being altogether and our own essential freedom — we no longer even realize the world we have lost. Ways of experiencing distance and time other than through the ever more precise neutral measuring with rulers and clocks become lost to us; they no longer seem to be types of knowing at all but are at most vague poetic representations. While many other critics of technology point to obvious dangers associated with it, Heidegger emphasizes a different kind of threat: the possibility that it may prevent us from experiencing “the call of a more primal truth.” The problem is not just that technology makes it harder for us to access that realm, but that it makes us altogether forget that the realm exists.

Yet, Heidegger argues, recognizing this danger allows us to glimpse and then respond to what is forgotten. The understanding of man’s essence as openness to this realm and of technology as only one way in which things can reveal themselves is the guide for keeping technology within its proper bounds. Early in the fourth and last Bremen lecture, Heidegger asks if the danger of technology means “that the human is powerless against technology and delivered over to it for better or worse.” No, he says. The question, however, is not how one should act with regard to technology — the question that seems to be “always closest and solely urgent” — but how we should think, for technology “can never be overcome,” we are never its master. Proper thinking and speaking, on the other hand, allow us to be ourselves and to reveal being. “Language is … never merely the expression of thinking, feeling, and willing. Language is the inceptual dimension within which the human essence is first capable of corresponding to being.” It is through language, by a way of thinking, that “we first learn to dwell in the realm” of being.

The thought that opens up the possibility of a “turn” away from technology and toward its essential realm is the realization of its danger. Heidegger quotes the German poet Friedrich Hölderlin: “But where the danger is, there grows also what saves.” By illuminating this danger, Heidegger’s path of thinking is a guide for turning away from it. The turn brings us to a place in which the truth of being becomes visible as if by a flash of lightning. This flash does not just illuminate the truth of being, it also illuminates us: we are “caught sight of in the insight.” As our own essence comes to light, if we disavow “human stubbornness” and cast ourselves “before this insight,” so too does the essence of technology come to light.

The Way of Nature and Poetry

Acloser look at “The Question Concerning Technology” and some of the ways it adds to the Bremen lectures will help us further to clarify Heidegger’s view. In the Bremen lectures, Heidegger focuses on the contrast between entities seen as pieces in an endless technological chain on the one hand, and “things” that reveal being by bringing to light the rich interplay between gods and humans, earth and sky on the other. His example of such a “thing” in the first lecture is a wine jug used for sacrificial libation: The full jug gathers in itself the earth’s nutrients, rain, sunshine, human festivities, and the gift to the gods. All of these together help us understand what the wine jug is. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” it is products understood in a certain way that Heidegger contrasts with technology’s revealing. Drawing on Aristotle’s account of formal, final, material, and efficient causes, Heidegger argues that both nature (physis) and art (poiesis) are ways of “bringing-forth” — of unconcealing that which is concealed. What is natural is self-producing, self-arising, self-illuminating, not what can be calculated in order to become a formless resource. Poetry also brings things to presence. Heidegger explains that the Greek word techne, from which “technology” derives, at one time also meant the “bringing-forth of the true into the beautiful” and “the poiesis of the fine arts.”

In contrast to Heidegger’s notion of a thing or of revealing stands the kind of objectivity for which our natural sciences strive. But in spite of what Heidegger himself borrows from Greek thought, he emphasizes that there is a link between modern technology and classic philosophy because of Plato’s understanding of being as permanent presence. For Plato, the “idea” of a thing — what it is — is its enduring look, which “is not and never will be perceivable with physical eyes” and cannot be experienced with the other senses either. This attention to what is purely present in contemplation, Heidegger argues, ultimately leads us to forget the being of things, what is brought forth, and the world of human concern.

Heidegger’s brief sketches in these lectures suggest powerful alternatives to technological understanding that help us to recognize its limits. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger’s hope is to “prepare a free relationship to [technology]. The relationship will be free if it opens our human existence to the essence of technology.” It is not the case “that technology is the fate of our age, where ‘fate’ means the inevitableness of an unalterable course.” Experiencing technology as a kind — but only one kind — of revealing, and seeing man’s essential place as one that is open to different kinds of revealing frees us from “the stultified compulsion to push on blindly with technology or, what comes to the same, to rebel helplessly against it and curse it as the work of the devil.” Indeed, Heidegger says at the end of the lecture, our examining or questioning of the essence of technology and other kinds of revealing is “the piety of thought.” By this questioning we may be saved from technology’s rule.

Meaning and Mortality

Heidegger’s discussions offer several useful directions for dealing with technology, even if one disagrees with elements of his analysis. Consider his view of distance, where he differentiates neutral measured distance and geometrical shape from the spaces and distances with which we concern ourselves day by day. Someone thousands of miles away can be immediately present to one’s feelings and thoughts. Two tables may have identical size, yet each may be too big or small for comfortable, practical, or beautiful use. Heidegger’s understanding of the importance of space changes somewhat in his works, but what matters for us is his insistence that our understanding of the spaces in which we live is neither inferior nor reducible to a neutral, technical, scientific understanding of space. This is also true of time, direction, and similar matters. Perhaps most profoundly, Heidegger attempts to make visible an understanding of what is present, enduring, and essential that differs from a notion of the eternal based on time understood narrowly and neutrally. Heidegger’s alternatives provide ways to clarify the irreducibility of our experience to what we can capture technologically, or through natural science. One example of this irreducibility is Aristotle’s virtue, which acts in light of the right time, the right place, and the right amount, not in terms of measures that are abstracted from experience. Ordinary human ways of understanding are not mere folk opinion that is subservient to science, as some might say; they offer an account of how things are that can be true in its own way.

A second direction that Heidegger gives us for properly situating technology is his novel understanding of human being. For Heidegger, the traits that make us human are connected to our openness to being and to what can be revealed, to our standing in a clearing where things can approach us meaningfully. One feature of this understanding is that Heidegger pays attention to the place of moods as well as of reason in allowing things to be intelligible. Another feature is his concern for the unity in meaning in what is and is not, in presence and absence. For instance, an absent friend impresses on us the possibility of friendship as much as one who stands before us.

Central to Heidegger’s understanding of human being is the importance of death and dying in our understanding of our independence and wholeness. The importance of dying governs his choice of one of the examples he uses in the second Bremen lecture to clarify the difference between technology and ordinary concern:

The carpenter produces a table, but also a coffin…. [He] does not complete a box for a corpse. The coffin is from the outset placed in a privileged spot of the farmhouse where the dead peasant still lingers. There, a coffin is still called a “death-tree.” The death of the deceased flourishes in it. This flourishing determines the house and farmstead, the ones who dwell there, their kin, and the neighborhood. Everything is otherwise in the motorized burial industry of the big city. Here no death-trees are produced.

The significance of mortality fits together with Heidegger’s thought about reverence and gods. Gratitude, thankfulness, and restraint are proper responses to knowing ourselves as beings who are mortal. Heidegger does not have in mind dignity in a conventional moral or Christian sense. Rather, he has in view the inviolability of being human and of things as they can be revealed. Reestablishing the experience of reverence is central for limiting the control of technological thinking.

The Necessity of Making Distinctions

Heidegger’s arguments about technology also raise several difficulties. Most pressingly, he obscures the grounds for ranking what we may choose, and thus for choice itself. How exactly are the death camps different from, and more horrible than, mechanized agriculture, if they are “in essence” the same? How can we understand technology to be powerful but not so rigidly encompassing as to eclipse possibilities for ethical action?

Heidegger’s analysis of technology has something in common with what the early modern thinkers — from Machiavelli through Locke and beyond — who first established the link between modern science and practical life, considered to be radical in their endeavors: the importance of truth merely as effectiveness, of nature as conquerable, of energy and force as tools for control. In contrast to Heidegger, however, for these thinkers such views are tied to a larger argument about happiness and what is good. Now, these early modern views of science and practical life — and alternative views, such as those expressed in classical thought — seem to be the true grounds for understanding the dominance of technology, and also for our ability to limit this dominance. The question we must ask is what Heidegger adds to the discussion of these thinkers, if they account for the realm of openness, revealing, and significance that Heidegger appears to have discovered, while affording grounds for moral ranking and prudential judgment absent in Heidegger.

Indeed, one might ask (despite Heidegger’s objection to the question) whence technology arises in its essence. Is the way that beings present themselves to us meaningful only in Heidegger’s sense, or can an account be given for this meaning that at the same time allows and even demands moral choice and openness to being beyond what Heidegger allows? Because matters appear to us technologically in a way that seems tied to choices we make based on particular views of happiness, of the good, and of the sacred (all of which are at least to some extent subject to rational discussion), isn’t it true that everything technological can be judged, disputed, evaluated, and ranked? Is our understanding of happiness, of the good, and of the sacred truly subservient to a prior understanding of entities as technological, or is it instead interspersed and coeval with it, or even prior to it?

We see in Heidegger’s other works instances where he amalgamates radical differences, similar to if less grotesque than comparing death camps and mechanized agriculture, such as his claim that America and communist Russia are “metaphysically” the same, both equally dominated by technology and the “rootless organization of the average man.” This claim again indicates how Heidegger’s view of metaphysical identity can distort significant differences, and how to attend to and choose among them. Things that present themselves technologically in Heidegger’s sense seem so controlled by a pervasive unified horizon that the possibility of our grasping and ranking these differences — whether from within a technological understanding or from outside — remains obscure. In response, we might suggest that the distortion and the overreaching that make elements of technology questionable are in fact visible within technological activity itself because of the larger political and ordered world to which it belongs. This is not a causally reductive relation, but a descriptive and organizing one. To experience technology is also to experience its limits. We recognize the gulf between death camps and mechanized agriculture, and the difference in kind between Soviet tyranny and American freedom, despite seeming similarities with respect to the place of technology, because these belong to larger wholes about which we can judge. Perhaps the key to understanding technology and to guiding it is, despite Heidegger’s animadversions, precisely to wonder about the ordinary question of how to use technology well, not piece by piece to serve isolated desires, but as part of a whole way of life.

~ Mark Blitz · Winter 2014.