Everybody loves a mystery — and right there, that’s the beginning of the problem. Who is Vivian Maier? And everybody loves a success story — and there you have the middle of the problem. Vivian Maier is now famous, and the people who ‘discovered’ her have become important. And finally, everybody loves to see the high brought low — the tag end of the problem. Vivian Maier was just an amateur and the people who’ve made her famous are vultures picking off her bones.

I suspect everybody who pays attention to photography knows the basic outline of the Vivian Maier story. Photographer/local historian John Maloof attends an auction and buys a storage locker full of old photographic prints and negatives. The photos, which are quite striking, turn out to be the work of a reclusive nanny. Maloof publicizes the photos, the nanny is hailed as a naïve genius at street photography, a new star is created in the photographic firmament, the entire combustible photographic world is agog and everybody is completely charmed.

Predictably, the initial delight at the discovery is followed by the Vivian Maier backlash. This response seems to be driven in large measure by the extravagance of the early hype about Maier’s work, and is peppered with a large dose of cynicism.

“[I]t’s way too early to declare Vivian ‘great’ or to appraise her place or status in any way”

“Maier is a good enough photographer, I certainly don’t think she’s one of the greats”

“I can find no steady thread of consistency in her style”

“[S]omebody (or somebodies) smell an art gold mine with Maier’s work and are doing a fantastic job of building buzz that will pay off for them in the long run”

“[G]reatness and fame are two very different things”

“Maier can never be recognized (or collected) at the same level as, say, Winogrand, Arbus, or Frank mainly because she worked in utter isolation and influenced nothing in her time”

The backlash has been as bombastic as the hype. The result is two highly polarized camps; one of which believes Maier was a gifted but unschooled master of photography, and one which sees her at best a prolific but lucky amateur and at worst as a hack. Thanks to the Internet, those two camps formed with astonishing speed, and they’ve informed the Vivian Maier narrative so thoroughly that at this point it’s difficult for anybody to look at her work with an unjaundiced eye.

I was a quiet observer at the beginning of the Vivian Maier problem, before the hype. In October of 2009, John Maloof posted the following in a Flickr discussion forum:

I purchased a giant lot of negatives from a small auction house here in Chicago. It is the work of Vivian Maier, a French born photographer who recently past away in April of 2009 in Chicago, where she resided.

I have a ton of her work (about 30-40,000 negatives) which ranges in dates from the 1950’s-1970’s. I guess my question is, what do I do with this stuff? Check out the blog. 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.

It’s clear Maloof believed the work was solid (though he was uncertain whether others would share his view). It’s equally clear the participants in the discussion largely agreed with him. It’s also obvious, though, that while Maloof was soon trying to promote the photography, he wasn’t making any exaggerated claims about Maier’s talent. He was genuinely intrigued by her work and her story.

It seems to me (and I’m sure other will disagree) that the hype didn’t originate with Maloof, though he was willing to feed it. So then, where did it come from?

I’m inclined to think it grew organically out of the situation. Vivian Maier really was a very odd woman. She really was an extremely talented photographer. She was almost certainly aware of what was going on in the world of photography, but it appears she really was essentially self-taught. Her photos and negatives really were a completely random, lucky find by John Maloof, who recognized he’d found something potentially extraordinary.

The situation sounds more like the plot of a novel or a screenplay than real life. Because of that, the narrative almost demands that Vivian Maier be an unrecognized genius or an over-promoted hack. It also requires that Maloof be either a savior who rescued her work or a villain who has taken advantage of another person’s talent. It has nothing to do with what actually happened; it has everything to do with what makes a better story.

In fact, it seems to me that the Vivian Maier Problem has relatively little to do with Vivian Maier or her photography. Rather, it’s grounded in the narrative imposed on her work by folks who spend their time thinking about photography (which isn’t a complaint, by the way; thinking about photography is a very fine thing to do — I do it myself).

I’ve spent some time over the last couple of weeks looking closely at the photographs in Maloof’s book Vivian Maier Street Photographer. Some of the photographs are unremarkable and a tad trite, even for the era in which they were shot. But others are absolutely stunning. Since the book was edited by Maloof (and, presumably, he also chose the photographs), there’s no way to tell if the photos are representative of Maier’s work or of Maloof’s editorial viewpoint.

In many ways, it doesn’t matter. There’s good work in the book. That’s what matters.

Does Vivian Maier deserve all the hype she’s received? No, of course not. She was not Mary Poppins with a Rolleiflex. She was not Cartier-Bresson in a dress and gloves. How could anybody possibly deserve all that hype?

But she deserves a great deal of it.

Naming new things is tough work. Back in the 1850s they had to coin a term to describe the physical manifestation of communications sent over a distance by electrical signal. Somebody came up with telegram. That’s a portmanteau of tele, which is Greek for ‘over a distance’, and gram, also Greek, meaning ‘something written or drawn’. It’s really pretty catchy, but telegram totally pissed off language purists of the day. They absolutely hated it. Hated it.

May I suggest to such as are not contented with ‘Telegraphic Dispatch’ the rightly constructed word ‘telegrapheme’? I do not want it, but … I protest against such a barbarism as ‘telegram.’ [Richard Shilleto, Cambridge Greek scholar, London “Times,” Oct. 15, 1857]

I’m not any sort of purist, but I find Instagram objectionable as a word. It’s so bland and corporate. It could have been worse; they might have called it Instagrapheme which, let’s face it, would have been intolerable. Still, Instagram is an unattractive and unappealing name, and it made it easy for lots of folks (including me) to sneer at it. And we did.

We sneered at Instagram for being a cheap, easy, lazy way to turn crappy photos into images that look artsy. Not ‘artful’ or ‘artistic’ but artsy. We sneered at it because the learning curve for using Instagram is — well, it’s hardly a curve at all. It’s almost a straight line. You shoot a photo with your cell phone, you flip through a couple dozen preset filters until you find one you like, tap to apply it, and hey bingo, you have yourself an artsy photo of your drunken friends at a tacky Chinese restaurant.

That ease of use is a big part of the appeal, of course. It allows any tunahead to bang out a halfway decent photograph. But it pisses off photography purists (purists of every persuasion spend a lot of time being pissed off, have you noticed?). The ease of use is another thing that makes Instagram so sneerable.

I grew up shooting film — and shooting it with a completely manual rangefinder camera without a resident light meter. That gave me certain inalienable sneering rights. But at the same time, I’m totally in favor of the democratization of photography. I love the fact that so many people are out there photographing so many things. 

That put me in a damned awkward position. How can I embrace the democratization of photography and at the same time still be able to sneer at Instagram? I told myself the app, at its best, was just a cheap imitation of real photography. At its worst, it was the devil itself. I told myself a lot of people — people who might otherwise actually learn the important mechanics and physics of photography — would substitute the creative process (which, let’s face it, can be really hard work) with the unthinking application of a filter. So I could argue that sneering at Instagram was actually good for photography. Right?

All that sneering was made a lot easier by the fact that I’d never really looked at Instagram. Then I bought a smartphone with a tolerably decent camera. And suddenly everybody was all “Dude, join Instagram.”

So I reluctantly decided to look at it. And to my smug delight, I discovered I was right. It really was a cheap imitation of real photography. It really was an artistic wasteland of hipsters in vests photographing their lattes, and hiphop wannabes shooting pictures of their two hundred dollar sneakers, and women shooting duckface selfies in bathrooms, and …whoa…hold on hold on…what’s this? What the hell is this?

‘This’ turned out to be good work. I started to come across photography I actually wanted to see. Images that impressed the hell out of me and made me want to see more. On Instagram.

I found solid, serious street photography. And good travel and landscape photography. And lawdy, good fine arts photography. I found good editorial news photography. Good color photography, good black-and-white photography. Good portraiture. Good photography. All of it right there in a 3-inch square on Instagram.

And that good shit, it was scalable. It looked good in a 3-inch square on my phone, but it continued to look good in larger versions. I was not expecting that.

Yes, yes — there’s a staggering amount of appalling crap on Instagram, but there’s a staggering amount of appalling crap everywhere in the world of photography. It’s one of the facts you accept if you believe in the democratization of photography. You accept the existence of the crap, and you try to help stem the tide by not making crap yourself.

So hey, I joined Instagram. Quietly. Uncomfortably. Under an assumed name. Like an atheist going to Sunday School. I began shooting a simple little series — something I could delete easily if I decided I was contributing to the crapitization of photography. That project gradually transformed and grew into something more complex, but coherent and constrained — which is how real photo projects start. I may write about that project at another time, but what it meant for me was that I was taking Instagram seriously. How the hell did that happen?

It also meant (in my mind, at least) that I should limit that account to that project.

So I created a second Instagram account. Yes, I actually created a second Instagram account, and devoted it to shooting black-and-white images.

The photographs you see here, and along the side of the blog (and if you’re interested, you can see more of them here) have taught me that Instagram is an incredibly flexible and elastic app. You can shape it to fit whatever you want to photograph, in whatever style you want to photograph it. You don’t have to rely on their crappy little filters; there are some very fine processing apps for your mobile phone that give you a metric buttload of control over the image.

Instagram, it turns out, is not about filters. It’s not even about easily turning crappy photos into artsy ones. It’s about distribution. It’s about putting the photos out there.

Instagram may, in fact. turn out to be the devil after all. It can be that seductive. But it’s the devil that’s likely to have the most influence on the shape of modern photography. 

Here’s where I drop in some more esoteric information. Eight hundred years ago King Richard I of England was captured on his way back from the Holy Land, where he’d been cheerfully slaughtering Muslims during the Crusades. While he was imprisoned, his brother John attempted to usurp the throne. When Richard won his release, King Philip of France sent a message to John, warning him. The message read: Look to yourself. The devil is loose.

The analogy isn’t perfect, but the warning is. The devil IS loose. And you know what? I kind of like him.

It might be art, but does that make it O.K.?

That’s the lead-in question raised in a New York Times article about photographer Arne Svenson’s new series Neighbors, which is on display in a Chelsea gallery. Svenson, who is probably best known for his still life photographs, came into possession of a 500mm lens. He didn’t buy it; according to reports, he ‘inherited’ the lens — whether from a friend who died or in some other way, it’s not clear. What is clear is that Svenson somehow ended up with a lens that’s great for wildlife and sports photography, but not particularly useful for still lifes.

So he did what I suspect any photographer would do. He put the lens on his camera and looked out the window. Since Svenson lives in an apartment in TriBeCa, it’s not surprising that when he looked out his window, he saw the apartment building across the street.

Neighours #1

Back in 1964 the social philosopher Abraham Kaplan posited the Law of the Instrument. He wrote: Give a small boy a hammer, and he will find that everything he encounters needs pounding. This concept is sometimes referred to as Maslow’s Hammer, because a couple of years later Abraham Maslow wrote: I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.

If you have a wildlife photographer’s lens, you treat everything you see through it as wildlife. And that’s sort of what Svenson did. He began to photograph his unsuspecting neighbors in the building across the street in much the same way a wildlife photographer would photograph, say, a Pileated Woodpecker. Quietly, surreptitiously, covertly. You don’t want to spook the bird; it’ll fly away. Svenson embraces this analogy.

“I am not unlike the birder, quietly waiting for hours, watching for the flutter of a hand or the movement of a curtain as an indication that there is life within.”

There’s a crucial difference between New Yorkers and woodpeckers, though. Birds don’t go to galleries in Chelsea. Birds never see their photographs hanging in a venue open to the public. Birds have a poor grasp on the concept of privacy. Birds don’t sue.

Neighbors #14

Not surprisingly, some of the people Svenson photographed have brought suit against him. Martha and Matthew Foster are seeking ‘actual and exemplary damages for intentional infliction of emotional distress and an injunction to stop the dissemination of the photographs’ (emphasis added). Ms Foster and her children appear in two of Svenson’s photographs — Neighbors #6 and Neighbors #12, which are being sold for US$5000 and $7500. Ten copies of each print are apparently being offered. According to the suit,

Plaintiffs were also greatly frightened and angered by defendant’s utter disregard for their privacy and the privacy of their children. Plaintiffs now fear that they must keep their shades drawn at all hours of the day in order to avoid telephoto photography by a neighbor who happens to be a professional photographer.

It needs to be noted that this is a civil suit, not a criminal case; Svenson’s behavior may be ethically questionable, but it doesn’t appear to be illegal. But even though a civil suit has a lower standard of proof than a criminal case (generally ‘a preponderance of evidence’ or ‘clear and convincing evidence’ rather than ‘beyond a reasonable doubt’), I suspect the Fosters will have a difficult time proving Svenson intentionally inflicted emotional distress on them. Their anger and distress are almost certainly real, but that’s not enough for them to win a civil suit.

Neighbors #12

So it seems Svenson did nothing criminal, and it appears unlikely he’ll be found civilly liable for his behavior. That brings us back to the ethical question raised in the Times: It might be art, but does that make Svenson’s behavior okay?

It’s really a rather silly question. I doubt many people would think using a telephoto lens to shoot surreptitious photographs of unsuspecting neighbors is okay. It’s most certainly not okay. It’s fucking rude, is what it is. Rude and more than a little creepy.

Neighbors #11

That said, I’m not convinced that ‘okay’ and ‘not okay’ are metrics that should be applied to art. I don’t think ‘rude’ or ‘creepy’ are useful yardsticks for measuring the acceptability of art. There’s good art and there’s bad art; there’s art that works and art that doesn’t. And those, of course, are entirely subjective measurements.

I’m not suggesting art trumps ethics, or that art is above ethics. Nor am I saying artists should ignore ethics. What I’m saying is that artists shouldn’t choose their subject matter based on whether it’s socially acceptable or not. They should, however, be willing to suffer whatever consequences arise from socially unacceptable art — including the occasional civil suit. In this case, as might be expected, the legal attention has brought Svenson’s work to a much wider audience and will almost certainly help his sales.

Neighbors #17

I think this is good art. I think these photographs work. I’m completely taken by the stillness, and the intimacy, and the painterly quality of the light. But at the same time, I think Svenson’s behavior in spying on his neighbors is morally reprehensible. If he’d done it to me, I’d very likely be massively pissed off. I’m glad he did it anyway.

I find myself wondering if the Fosters weren’t the subjects of the photographs and saw them — in a book, on a gallery wall, in a magazine — if they’d have appreciated them as photographs. As art. I wonder if they’d be able to look at Neighbors #6 and Neighbors #12 and, instead of seeing an appalling invasion of their own personal privacy, see them as lovely photographs depicting a happy, close-knit family. Because that’s what I see.