photography

The engrossing documentary Finding Vivian Maier begins with the death of a Chicago woman so obscure that none of her neighbors knew her name.  She was a standoffish hoarder, and when a box of her junk is acquired at an estate auction, the buyer, a picker named John Maloof, finds lots and lots of photographs.  He posts some of them on the Internet, and it turns out that the woman was, hitherto undiscovered, one of the great 20th Century photographers.  So Maloof acquires the other boxes from the auction and embarks on a quest to find out who she was, why she took over 100,000 images and why she never showed them. Fortunately, we get to come along.

We quickly learn that her name was Vivian Maier, and that she worked as a nanny.   As Maloof’s journey of discovery takes us to another city and then to another country, we begin to piece together her life.  Because Maier lived with families to raise their children, we meet some of her former charges. We are able to construct what she looked and sounded like, how she dressed and walked and about her array of eccentricities.  We learn about a very disturbing dark side.

But Maier remained secretive even inside the families’ homes, so some of the puzzle pieces remain undiscovered.  We can infer that a pivotal event happened during her childhood.  We conclusively find out that she was obsessively private, but we can only guess why.

Vivian Maier is no longer obscure.  Her work is now shown widely in museums and galleries.  As a photographer, she had an uncommon gift to connect personally with her subjects and to document the humor and tragedy of the most human moments.  In the guise of a detective story, Finding Vivian Maier does her justice.