Our Lady of Street Photography

I sometimes wonder if Vivian Maier isn't some sort of an elaborate hoax perpetrated on the gullible ... like me.  After all, it is generally said if something is too good to be true, it probably is.  Is she really the exception to the rule?

If you don't feel like following the hotlink (your loss; the pictures are absolutely amazing), I'll quickly summarize.  Maier was a nanny who, on her off days, pursued an interest in photography, generally using a twin-lens Rolleiflex and black and white film.  She shot thousands of rolls of film, but apparently the photography was a reward in itself.  The general public knew nothing of this until a large number of her negatives were purchased when a storage bin was auctioned.  The buyer, discovering the quality of her work, began to research who she was.  He located her ... just months after her death.  Here's the long version.

Her stuff stands up with Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank ... and coming from me, that's saying something.  It's revealing and stunningly beautiful, deep and full.  She clearly had a quick, perhaps anticipatory eye, and a really fast hand.  Focusing the Rollei, I've discovered, is far more difficult than you'd think.  The thing has a surprisingly narrow depth of field -- useful in making the picture interesting, but devilishly hard to anticipate without a lot of experience.  It would be interesting to see some proof sheets ...

On top of all that, the pictures are amazingly revelatory.  Of course, that's the purpose with "street photography" in general -- to capture life unawares -- but in many images, her subjects seem blissfully unaware of the woman with the magic box.  How is this?  My days are bracketed with people ponderously announcing, as if they were senators on the way to a meeting of the Trilateral Commission, that they don't want their picture taken.  Fine, pal, whatever.

This usually happens to me while heaving a 28-pound, AJ-SPC700P Panasonic television camera onto my shoulder, so I am a less-than subtle figure.  And this got me thinking: Was it the Rollei that helped her?  The waist-level finder, the cognac leather case, comfortably slung around the neck of that plain woman?  "What on earth," the subject might for a moment think, "is that odd lady taking a picture of?  There's nothing here but a street."  It's worked for me -- the quickly deployed Leica, a la the immortal HCB, or the Rollei casually slung over the shoulder -- but more often than not, I get busted.  My more candid stuff almost always happens when I'm around people who have become accustomed to me, to the point of dismissing the camera as part of the background.

But I have begun to think of late that it wasn't just the creative cauldron of the 1950s that caused all those people -- HCB, Frank and Maier -- to do great work then.  I'm wondering if the inability to get, or perhaps rarity of, pictures like that is because we're all so media aware now.  A DSLR for example is a great, huge, unsubtle weapon of potential personal destruction in the age of the cellphone.  Everyone can make digital pictures, and the very thing I selfishly treasure about my gear (the fact that it announces that I am a professional*) is what kills my chances of candid shots.  "Why is that pro taking my picture?  Where is he going to sell it?"  That is what now goes through the subject's mind.

For Maier, photography was still an unusual, complicated and infrequent hobby.  Sure, families had cameras, but they were hauled out for special occasions and trips to the Grand Canyon.  A single roll of film in the Kodak (yes, children, once upon a time the fabulous Kodak made cameras too) could last six months or a year.  When it was finally shot out, the canister was ceremonially delivered to the local camera shop, where solicitous but elite professionals would carefully swath it in a special envelope for delivery to Rochester, from whence it might return in a week or so.

To walk the streets with a Rollei was the province of a newspaperman -- someone rarely seen, and then only at news events.  His usually came with a massive flash gun, and was about as unsubtle as artillery.  For that thin, drably dressed, common woman to be walking about with one was ... well, you just didn't see that a lot.  Far from being a curiosity, I wonder if it just didn't register.  The brain didn't expect it, and in the demands of daily life -- a life in which cameras had little presence, let alone import -- the sight was dismissed as unthreatening and therefore unimportant.  As part of the background, Maier was able to approach closer, catch moments more honestly.

Or maybe I'm just jealous.



*I admit a certain amount of ego, as well as professional pride, in being known as someone who is a photographer.  When working as a photojournalist, this carries through in the mentality that I deserve to be able to go where others can't (eg: the sidelines at a football game) because that is my job, and I am not beyond holding a camera very prominently, like a shield, to bully people out of my way.  Surprising how often that works ...