“What are you doing?”
“Taking a photo.”
“Of what…that thing? With the wheels?”
“Nope, the lines.”
“Lines?”
“Lines.”
“Like…lines?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t get it.”
“I know. It’s okay.”
“Lines.”
“Yes.”
“Okay then.”
The truck, that was the first thing I noticed — just off the road, on the other side of a deep, grassy ditch. At some point in time it had been a serious truck. Not a gentleman farmer’s pick-up that could also be used to run errands, but a full-sized working truck built to haul serious payloads. Now it was basically a ruin; sitting lop-sided in the dead grass. It had been sitting there so long it had actually settled into the soil.
Beyond the truck was a house. A small farmstead, really — the house, a collapsed barn, a few small outbuildings, some sheds, a scattering of grain bins, rusted farm equipment. There was surprisingly little vandalism, aside from a few shattered windows and maybe the front door, which had been torn from its hinges. Most of the damage appeared to be the result of weather and long neglect. The property was clearly abandoned, and had been for some time.
It’s a curious term, abandon. It connotes a complete giving up, an absolute and total acknowledgment that there will be no return, a total surrender. Perhaps whoever lived there had originally intended to return — but at some point there had to be a moment of recognition that it would never happen. There’s something profoundly sad about that.
Here’s an odd thing: I couldn’t bring myself to enter the house. I mounted the stairs and stood in the doorway, but I was reluctant to go inside. Not because it wasn’t safe (the house itself seemed pretty stable), and not because it would be trespassing (legally, I was already trespassing). I was unwilling to go inside because it felt wrong. It felt like a violation, somehow. What makes it odd is that at one point in my life I had a job that involved routinely trespassing and violating the privacy of other folks. But back then I was getting paid; to trespass in the house for no reason other than my own amusement seemed like some sort of transgression.
However, I didn’t feel that way about the other buildings on the property. I noodled around in them without any compunction at all. This one, for example.
It was just a few yards away from the main house. The roof had caved in a long time ago, and the debris made it almost impossible to walk around. It didn’t help that there were obvious nails and shards of broken glass lying about (combined with the fact that I was wearing sneakers). Still, it was easy to tell the building had most recently been used as a sort of office or studio.
The bones of an old Hackley upright piano occupied the main room.
In 1863, at the height of the American Civil War, Milo J. Chase began building pianos in Grand Rapids, Michigan. A few years later, his company was reorganized as Chase-Hackley Pianos. The company had a good reputation as builders of durable, medium quality instruments. The pianos could be bought directly from the manufacturers, which allowed buyers to avoid sales and additional shipping charges. This made Chase and Hackley pianos popular with rural and farm families — at least until they went out of business in 1930, victims of the Great Depression.
It’s easy to imagine farm kids sitting in front of this old Hackley, struggling away at some painful version of Clair de Lune.
Behind the house were a variety of small, slowly collapsing sheds and workshops, as well as well as some farm equipment — all of which suggest that at one time this was a rather successful farming operation. There was a woodworking shed, a machine and tool shed, and a couple of storage buildings — all of which were in some stage of dilapidation. Only a few had working doors; none had functioning windows.
As with the house, most of the damage was a result of time and weather — and in some cases, animals. One bench was littered with raccoon shit, there were what appeared to be small mammal nests under some of the workbenches, and paw prints in the dust.
The barn was the most severely damaged structure on the farmstead. The roof and one wall had completely collapsed, two of the other walls were pretty unstable, and the fourth wall seemed to be supported primarily by stacked bales of old hay. I wouldn’t have gone inside at all, except that I could see some bones — and bones make me stupid.
So I crouched down and groucho-walked inside to look at them. It was dark, of course, and what I first thought was an old sack turned out to be the semi-mummified remains of a dog. It appeared to have died of exposure or natural causes rather than violence, and was eviscerated by other creatures after death. The roof was too low at that point to allow me to examine the dog closely. I couldn’t even photograph it properly; I had to hold the camera out at arm’s length and shoot blindly. This is the only shot that was in focus — which is probably just as well.
I didn’t stay at the farmstead very long. Places to go, people to meet, and all that. But the entire time I was there, I was very aware of my own internal dissonance. I’m not a terribly self-reflective person under most circumstances. I don’t spend much (or any) time thinking about what I feel, or wondering why I do stuff. Yet I was conscious of being torn between feeling This is so sad and thinking This is so cool.
Because it was so sad and it was so cool, and it still is. I’ll almost certainly go back at some point when I have more time to explore. Maybe I’ll even overcome my conscience and actually go inside the house.
Twice in the last couple of weeks I’ve been asked about my ‘photographic style.’ The first time I basically said “Dunno, never thought about it.” I mean, who thinks about stuff like that? The second time I said “New Topo, laid on its side, and turned 45 degrees to the left.” I said it as a joke, but after I said it, I sorta kinda became the type of person who thinks about stuff like that. And hey, it turned out to be sorta kinda true.
Back in 1975 a guy named William Jenkins curated an exhibition of a new school of landscape photography: the New Topographics movement. Landscape photography to that point in time had generally followed the path of landscape painting, which for the most part consisted of romantic depictions of ‘undisturbed’ nature. We either had the Ansel Adams approach (epic vistas photographed on a grand scale in black and white) or the Eliot Porter approach (intimate color images of a few trees or a handful of leaves scattered on a pond). Nothing wrong with either approach, but that was basically it.
Traditional New Topo approach
Then along came Jenkins and his New Topo crew. His exhibition consisted of 168 black-and-white prints of warehouses, industrial sites, suburban tract housing, filling stations. The idea behind the exhibition was to present the modern landscape as it actually existed rather than in an idealized way. Most art photographers used the camera as a device for self-expression. The New Topographics photographers reduced the camera to its most basic function.
The camera, after all, is a tool that records everything in front of the lens. Every goddamned thing, not just the pretty stuff or the majestic stuff. And it records it all with the same precision. It records with a detached, unemotional, deadpan eye. That’s all a camera does. With that idea in mind, New Topo photographers deliberately attempted to remove any notion of ‘artistry’ from the act of photography. Their intent was to depict the objects in front of the lens in a way that merely mapped their surface. In other words, to reduce the subject of the photograph to an essentially topographic state.
Neo-New Topo
The exhibition garnered a lot of attention. Not all of it was positive. Hell, relatively little of it was positive. Most folks thought the photographs were bland, uninteresting, boring, even ugly. And hey, those folks were right. I tend to agree. In my opinion, a lot of those photos really were butt-ugly. But they were interesting.
People who thought about photography as an art — not just viewed it, but consciously and deliberately thought about what photography was and could be — those folks found the exhibition fascinating. Why? In part because they realized the emotionally detached camera opened up a visual world in which people could see the stuff that had previously been filtered out. The ugly stuff. The old tires, the broken sidewalks, the trash cans, the old telephone wires, the litter. All the crap photographers normally worked hard to exclude from their photographs.
Nouveau-Neo-New Topo
But there was a problem. Humankind has spent something like twelve thousand years unconsciously building the foundation of aesthetics. It’s really difficult to just toss all that aside. It’s hard NOT to look for beauty, hard NOT to try to include that beauty in a photograph. That’s a lot of human nature to overcome.
So a sort of Neo-New Topographics style emerged fairly quickly (and yeah, I just made that name up). It’s a style in which photographers still photographed the same anonymous human-shaped landscapes, and continued to objectively map the surfaces of whatever is in front of the lens — but with the recognition that even industrial sites and warehouses can be beautiful. And after that, a Nouveau-Neo-New Topo approach, in which photographers actively sought out what beauty can be found through surface mapping.
Oblique Nouveau-Neo-New Topo
That idea has become a big chunk of my photographic patch. Over the last few years I’ve been working in a sort of Oblique Nouveau-Neo-New Topo style. Surface mapping at a slant. New Topo, laid on its side, and turned 45 degrees. Because I prefer my surface to have depth. I like a surface that extends itself. A surface that sort of falls away.
ONNNT (which is also the sound a Canada Goose makes when landing in icy water)
I can’t really say that’s my ‘style’ since I shoot all sorts of crap. But when I’m deliberately looking and seeing photographically, that’s pretty much my default approach. Find an interesting surface — then either photograph it straight or find an angle that allows the eye to shift off into the distance. Oblique Nouveau-Neo-New Topo. Takes longer to say than to shoot.
But hey, at least now I have a response the next time somebody asks me about my photographic style. ONNNT.
The photo that sparked the question the second time.
One of the advantages (and let’s face it, there aren’t many) to being a freelance writer is that on any given day you can look out the window, see that it’s a lovely afternoon, and say “Fuck it, I’m going to go wander.” You can’t do that very often, of course, if you want to keep beans and tortillas on the table. But just knowing you can say it — and do it — is pretty liberating.
Yesterday I looked out that window, saw that it was a perfectly lovely autumn afternoon, said “Fuck it” (and yeah, I said it right out loud), turned off the computer, grabbed my aging little Fujifilm X10 camera, and walked out the door. I knew exactly where I wanted to go. Sort of.
The Chichaqua Bottoms Greenbelt. I knew it existed. I’d seen it on Google maps. I knew generally where it was located (it’s only about 20 minutes by car from where I live). I had a basic understanding of what was meant by ‘bottoms’ and ‘greenbelt’. But I’d never taken the time to actually go there. Proof, if you needed proof, that I can be a massive fucking idjit.
This might seem silly, but one reason I wanted to visit the place is because of Chichaqua. I’ve mentioned this before, but it’s worth repeating. Some 350 years ago when this area was being explored and mapped by French coureurs de bois and voyageurs, they asked the local Sauk and Meskwaki Indians what the river was called. The river, they were told, was Chicaqua. The French had also heard that same term to describe a skunk,so they assumed that was the name of the river. The French began calling it Rivière Mouffette. Skunk River. And that’s what it’s still called. In fact, chichaqua was a term meaning ‘having a powerful smell.’ The natives had been talking about the wild onions and cabbage that grew along the river banks.
I don’t know why that amuses me so much. But it does.
What’s weird, though, is the Chichaqua Bottoms Greenbelt is no longer a part of the Skunk River. A century ago (give or take a few decades) folks decided to ‘straighten’ the river. Which is a pretty arrogant thing to do. The idea was that a slow-moving, winding, meandering river was inefficient and prone to flooding. So they dug a massive gash in the ground and re-channeled the river. This sort of thing happened all over the world, by the way — not just in the American Midwest. Nobody realized at the time that a slow-moving, meandering river was a good thing for flooding. It localized the flood, which reduced the overall severity. Nobody realized that ‘straightening’ a river would reduce an area’s biodiversity. Hell, nobody knew what biodiversity was, or why it might be a good thing.
So…big gash, straight river. And about 25 miles of the old Skunk was isolated.
See that straight blue line on the map? That’s the current channel of the South Skunk River. It’s basically a long ditch. A very pretty ditch, to be sure, and I love wandering along it. Nature has made interesting and lovely, but it’s still a ditch. That wiggly blue line? That’s the old channel. Nothing even remotely ditch-like about it.
Back in 1960, the county bought up about 9000 acres of the old Skunk River channel. The water had never drained from the old channel; the area had basically become a series of oxbow lakes and bottoms. What the hell are oxbows and bottoms? Glad you asked. That’s an oxbow in the photograph below.
An oxbow is a U-shaped body of water; it occurs naturally in meandering rivers. An oxbow lake is one that’s formed when the U-shaped loop is cut off from the main channel, either because some engineering fuckwit decides to ‘straighten’ the river, or because a big flood (or sometimes an earthquake) will shift the river channel itself. Bottoms, on the other hand, are alluvial lowlands, which probably doesn’t tell you much. It’s what we call that land by a river that floods all the time. Marshy land, mosquito-breeding swamps, rich in sediment. If a river runs through a city, the Bottoms are where the poor folks usually live.
That bench in the photograph below? That’s sitting on bottomland. Oxbow lakes and bottoms. Great for wildlife and flood reduction. Sucks for housing.
After the county bought up the old Skunk River channel, they sort of encouraged it to be more of what it already was — a wildlife habitat. They re-introduced otters, and bobolinks, and wild turkeys, and a few species of endangered turtles. Other species returned on their own, like Pileated Woodpeckers and various raptors. They preserved old trees and planted tree species that used to grow in the area before it became farmland.
And I have to say, they’ve done a fantastic job. The place is completely fucking beautiful. Within the first half hour I was there I saw two Great Blue Herons walking along the dead-end road that leads to the area. Herons on the road. They were apparently gigging for frogs in the marshy ponds just off the blacktop. I saw the first bobolink I’ve ever seen in the wild. I nearly stepped on a Northern Water Snake that was three and a half feet long.
Did I get photos of those critters? No, I didn’t. Why? Because I was too busy looking at them to bring my camera to my eye. I’m rubbish when it comes to wildlife photography. What I did instead was photograph the stuff that didn’t move. You know — trees and all that. The water — which I guess does move, even in oxbow lakes. But the lakes and marshes themselves are pretty stationary. I’m not much better at landscape photography than I am at shooting wildlife. I think that’s partly because the landscape is SO BIG and the camera can only jam a small chunk of it through the lens. Still, these photos will, I hope, give you some small idea of the Chichaqua Bottoms.
I’d only planned to be there a short time. I figured maybe an hour. You know, just a break from work to refresh my mind — then back to the computer. But do you remember that bit I mentioned at the beginning of this post? That bit about one of the few advantages of being a freelance writer is the ability to say “Fuck it, I’m going to go wander”? Well, that’s exactly what I did.
It’s days like this that make the lack of a steady income bearable. Pension plan? Pffft. You can’t put days like this in the bank. You have to spend them when you have them.
Ninety percent of the work I do takes place in my head. The other ten percent involves shifting that work from my head to the computer through my fingers. Because so much of my work involves the creative writing of other folks, I spend a lot of time thinking about odd stuff, asking myself odd questions, researching odd topics.
Example? Sure, here’s one. Last week, I found myself exploring the history, function, and evolution of the lapel — complete with tangents on why we only see peaked lapels on formal evening wear, and the sad decline of the boutonnière loop on the reverse of the lapel. Here’s another issue I dealt with last week: at what point, in a science fiction mystery set in a massive orbiting space colony, does the number of sapient species living in the colony cease to create the illusion of the diversity of life in the known universe and begin to become a distraction from the story?
Where the gravel road intersects the line of trees is a bridge spanning a river.
I do most of this thinking and wondering and questioning and researching in a small office with a window that looks out on a deeply uninteresting suburban street. I periodically shift to the kitchen table, where the windows look out on some deeply uninteresting suburban back yards. The absence of anything visually interesting is usually a good thing; it makes it easier to stay inside my head, where almost everything is interesting.
But I also need to regularly reset my brain, so once or twice a week I either bang into the city or I go lounge around the countryside — which I tend to think of as either a cold boot or a warm boot (do people even use those terms anymore to describe different levels of rebooting a computer?). The city is a cold boot. A complete re-start. The countryside is a warm boot. Restarting without going through the rigorous Power On Self Test.
Jameson and Peanut
A couple of days ago I did a warm boot. Got in the car late one afternoon, went looking for a bridge over a river. Any bridge, any river. It’s really a pretty easy task. There are rivers, creeks, brooks, and streams all over the Midwest. The same with roads. At some point all those roads have to intersect with all those rivers, creeks, brooks, and streams. And that means a bridge.
Fifteen — maybe twenty — minutes later I was standing on a classic steel truss bridge spanning the South Skunk River. These used to be pretty common bridges; easy to build, practical, sturdy. They began making them out of wood in the 1870s, moved to cast iron a few decades later, then to steel in the early 1900s. Engineers still make various forms of truss bridge, but these old steel units on secondary or gravel roads are gradually being replaced by safer, more easily built, less expensive (and much less interesting) concrete beam bridges.
Perfectly understandable from a governance perspective. But it’s still rather sad. There’s simply no romance in a concrete beam bridge. No struts on which Peanut and Jameson can record their love.
Skunk River
It’s a nice river though, the South Skunk. Hundred and eighty-five miles long. Add another ninety-five miles after it joins up with the North Skunk and they both meander down into the Mississippi.
It’s not actually named for skunks, by the way. Back in the mid-17th century when the French coureurs de bois and voyageurs were wandering around in the wilderness, they often (and I mean seriously often) failed to properly translate the names given to local geographical landmarks by the native peoples. The local Sauk and Meskwaki tribes told the French explorers that the river was Chicaqua, a term meaning ‘having a powerful smell.’ The Indians were apparently referring to the onions that grew wild along the banks. But since they’d also used the same term in describing skunks…well, there it is. The Skunk River.
Long and straight, heading due east.
I noodled around on the bridge for a while, no longer thinking about aliens or the sociology of fashion, then got back in the car and headed farther upriver. But this is the Midwest, and the roads rarely follow the course of geological features. The secondary highways and gravel roads are long and straight, laid out east-west and north-south on a grid.
That’s the work of Thomas Jefferson. I don’t mean to suggest Jefferson was out in Iowa with a surveyor’s theodolite (that’s that little telescope-looking thing). It’s just that he came up with the concept of the Public Land Survey System. After the Revolutionary War, the new U.S. government needed to raise some cash, and find a way to reward the soldiers who’d fought. The solution was pretty obvious: there was a whole lot of land unoccupied by white folks — give it to the troops.
But first that new land had to be surveyed. It took years to actually implement the system. It wasn’t until white folks began to ‘civilize’ Ohio that the government began to apply the system. It’s really pretty simple. They established east-west baselines and north-south meridians, divided the territory into square townships (never mind if there were any actual towns there yet), made each township six miles by six miles, divided the townships into thirty-six sections of 640 acres each, set aside one section (always Section 16) for a school, and when it came time to lay down roads all they had to do was follow the grid.
Canoe access farther up the South Skunk.
Which is what I did. I followed the grid. A couple of miles east, eight miles north, a few miles west, cross over the soulless, ugly little concrete beam bridge, and there’s the river. With a canoe access marker, telling me how far downriver the next canoe access point is.
The brain is rebooted. I go home and the problem with the alien species saturation point seems a lot more clear. Later when a friend asked “How was your day?” I replied, “It was busy.” “Yeah? What did you do?”
And really, what could I say? I drove on roads laid out on principles designed by the third President of the United States, and stood on a bridge probably built during the Depression of the 1930s over a river mis-named by French explorers a hundred years before Thomas Jefferson was born — all to distract myself from thinking about aliens and lapels.
Instead I said “I went for a drive and thought about some stuff.” Which sparked a long, long silence during which I swear I could hear my friend thinking “What? Are you fucking kidding me? That’s what you call busy?”
“And I made my final selections for my fantasy football team,” I said. That seemed to satisfy him.
You know whose birthday it is? Today, the 27th day of July–whose birthday? It’s okay if you don’t know, on account of I’m going to tell you.
It’s the birthday of William Joseph Eggleston. You know, the photographer? The guy who took black-and-white art photography by the neck, wrestled it to the ground, and rubbed its face in bright, bright color. Lurid color. William Eggleston. Bill. Born in that fine Southern city of Memphis, Tennessee. 1939. Seventy-five years old today.
Yeah, he’s still alive. His son, Winston, told The New Yorker magazine that Eggleston will likely spend the day “playing Bach sonatas on his recently installed Bösendorfer piano.” Yeah. Maybe. Or maybe that’s just the sort of thing a son would tell The New Yorker magazine, because he didn’t want to say his dad might just spend the day slowly sipping bourbon and looking out the window at Overton Park in Memphis, wondering how the hell he could possibly be seventy-five years old.
He pissed off a lot of important photography folks, Bill Eggleston. Folks like Walker Evans, who didn’t like color photography. Walker Evans, whose quest was to make photographs that were “literate, authoritative, transcendent” (which he did, by the way, nobody can say Evans was anything less than literate and authoritative). But the man just didn’t like color.
“There are four simple words on the matter, which must be whispered: Color photography is vulgar.”
He was authoritative on that, no mistake. Eggleston, though, liked vulgar color. And he didn’t give a rat’s ass about being authoritative or transcendent. He had–and probably still has–a subversive eye. “I am at war with the obvious,” Eggleston once said. Which, given the vivid color of his photography, sounds an awful lot like bullshit. But it’s not.
I wrote about Eggleston’s war with the obvious half a decade ago, and I’m just too lazy to spend the time trying to find a way to repeat it using different words. You can read it if you’re interested. Or just trust me–when Eggleston said he was at war with the obvious, he was straight up telling the truth.
Eggleston at a piano (photo by Juergen Teller)
I’m hoping Eggleston has himself a happy birthday. I’m hoping he really does play some Bach on his fancy piano. And sips some bourbon. And maybe spends some time outside. It would be cool if he shot some photos today, but if he doesn’t…well, he’s taken his share. It’s okay if he leaves the camera at home.
(By the way, that photo above–the one by Juergen Teller? It’s a damned fine photo. I like it a lot. But it’s pretty obvious. Teller does good work, but he’s no William Joseph Eggleston, is he.)
Back in January I wrote about my reluctant conversion to Instagram. I was one of those people who mocked and jeered the app. I was one of those folks who used a camera to shoot photos — not a telephone with integrated camera-like technology. I considered Instagram to be a platform for cheesy photographers to display cheesy snapshots of their feet, or drunken snapshots of their drunken friends at parties, or sappy snapshots of sappy sunsets.
And hey, there really is a LOT of that stuff to be found in Instagram. But when I started to noodle around looking at photos on Instagram, I discovered there was also a surprising amount of really good work. It was because of that work (along with the purchase of a phone with a moderately decent camera) that I decided to dip my toe into the Instagram stream.
22 July, 2013
So in July of last year, I created an Instagram account. I was shy about it. I didn’t want something that could be publicly associated with me, so I used an alias for my account: Knuckles Dobrovic. I conceived a really simple (and let’s face it, really contrived) idea for some Instagram-ish photos: I would put something on a glass patio table, and I’d photograph it.
It was intended to be a lighthearted experiment. I was just going to noodle around and see what the cellphone camera could do, and get some idea of how Instagram worked. I wanted it to be something I could delete without hesitation or regret if/when it became too embarrassing or too dull.
August 3, 2013
What I’d actually done, of course, was unconsciously sabotage the experiment. I didn’t want to like Instagram. And in the earliest photographs, that really showed. I just put any damned thing near to hand on the table — some ears of corn, a baseball, a beer bottle, a random collection of old eyeglasses — and photographed it without much care or concern about the final image.
Sure, there was some minimal attempt at composition, but it remained basically a fairly lackadaisical exercise.
September 19, 2013
At some point, however, the experiment took hold of me. I found myself being more thoughtful and deliberate about the photos. I began to look around to find things that would be more photogenic on the table. I began to compose the shots more carefully. When I was out and about, I began collecting things specifically for the table. I talked about the project to friends and family. I actually began to care about the photographs.
November 4, 2013
Things on a Table became an actual project. Almost every day, I put something on the table and photographed it. I began to vary the time of day I shot the photo so I could use different light and catch different shadows. I photographed things on the table in all sorts of weather. I’d shift the table to different spots on the deck to get different patterns of line, light and shadow.
I even considered taking the table to different locations — out into the country, onto the sidewalk, into the city. That idea got tossed fairly quickly, mainly because it would have been a massive pain in the ass. But the important thing was that I’d begun to set specific parameters for limits on the project.
November 22, 2013
Winter came and snow covered the table, and I still put a thing on it and took a photo. I even began to create ice-things for the table. I’d find a thing, put it in a container, fill the container with water, set it outside and photograph the frozen result. I’d stuff things inside balloons, then fill the balloons with water and let them freeze. I’d shoot the photo, then leave the frozen things on the table and let the snow cover them. Over time the heat of the sun or the force of the wind would gradually reveal them, and I’d photograph them again.
January 9, 2014
To my surprise, friends and family members began gathering assorted bits and bobs of stuff they thought might appeal to me or look good on the table. An odd rock, plastic bubble wrap from a toner cartridge, an interesting weed, a hubcap found along the road. Eventually, people I know only through social media began to mail me things to put on the table.
I began to re-use some of the things — a piece of driftwood, a half a brick, some dead flower blossoms, an ornamental magnifier — partly because I like their shape or texture, and partly because the idea of continuity of things appealed to me.
March 15, 2014
Like any project, this one occasionally feels like a chore. I’ve considered abandoning it two or three times. But each time I’d spot something that might be interesting on the table, and I’d find myself out on the deck trying to find an angle that worked.
At this point I figure I’ll finish out the year. I’ll continue to photograph things on the table into July. Then I’ll probably come up with some other sort of project, simply because I’ve grown fond of the name Knuckles Dobrovic.
April 29, 2014
I realize that’s a stupid reason. I don’t care. I’ve no objection to doing things for stupid reasons. I mean, I’m the guy who came up with the name Knuckles Dobrovic just to photograph random things on a table. Stupid is where I live.
May 23, 2014
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.
