the Sensationalism of Vivian Maier

The work of Vivian Maier is intriguing on many levels and has gained mass appeal over the span of several years. Besides the role of social media, I came up a number of reasons of why Vivian Meyers is so compelling to a contemporary audience.

1. Her photography acts as a diary or visual case study. Her obsessive documentation acts as a lens of her life and of the world around her over the span of many years
2. She is a working class woman photographer when knowledge of and access to film was not as accessible
3. She was self-taught and had a strong eye of composition
4. The nature of her work raises many questions about her the story and story and conditions of her life/ known facts about her life raise questions about her work (such as location and access to cameras)
5. Her work has a historic quality, showing street life during the early 20th century

I am a fan of Vivian Maier's work but  my view of her work is also impacted by the "sensational" quality of her life. In my mind I compare her appeal to that of Henry Darger and Van Gogh. Henry Darger's work has an obsessive nature in it, he was a custodian, he was skilled and self taught and his work was discovered only after his death. Van Gogh is a classic example of the "suffering artist" that never sold a painting in his life and his work is a combination of self awareness and depictions of the country life surrounding him. These are just two examples of artists highly invested in their work that did not achieve fame during their lifetime but have a developed a posthumous type of cult appreciation.

I was very impressed by the research and connections made by Pamela Bannos, especially since she was not familiar with this kind of detective work before the Vivian Maier case. It amazed me how she was able to mark the date and location of photos by small clues and how she was able to draw on newspaper archives for evidence. The way that she tracked her movement of Vivian Maier on Google Maps, used her knowledge of culture and features of cameras of the period to understand Vivian Maier's use and access of them, how she was able to understand that by a subtle change in lighting  that a photo was taken from multiple angles and how a certain door occurring in several photos was the entrance to dark room--these all made me think of the kids of dots that are connected on shows like CSI.