Finding Vivian Maier

She had an eye for the bizarre, the grotesque, the incongruous. She liked headlines that revealed the folly of individuals, where you could say 'I told you so.' Some man murders his wife then gets caught in cold blood. I told you so. The things that revealed the folly of humanity. If you look at her art, she sees the bizarreness of life, the incongruity of life, and the unappealingness of human beings.

This description of Maier and her work made me think that she's a kindred spirit to Flannery O'Connor, a woman only one year her elder. Certain aspects of their work make a lot of people flinch, but they'd most likely have left one another unfazed, and certainly could have produced some interesting, albeit dark, collaborations.

And while this edge to Maier's personality and body of work can't stay unacknowledged, it's an overstep to reduce her work to this single dimension. Like the self-employed journalist she pretended to be, she did an incredible job of capturing and reflecting the full spectrum of the human condition in its honest entirety, good, bad, and ugly, be it a moment of tenderness, beauty, absurdity, or darkness. The vast scope of her work is precisely the reason it resonates as it does. She had a curiosity for the details of who we are and what we do, and in my mind that's most often what makes a good artist.

There are moments where I like that cliché conversation starter: what will you ask God when you get to heaven? 

I imagine sitting down with Him for a long chat about mental illness. What is it? and Why? and Is it really illness? and Why do the mentally ill so often serve as artists, and as such, chosen as prophets? Why do the mentally ill seem to actually have a better grasp on some things than those of us who are "sane"? Who's really mentally ill here? What's the real delusion?

(cross reference to the lunatic in Revolutionary Road...or Sufjan Stevens' Age of Adz...)

Zoom out to the human condition in which Maier was trapped and tried so desperately to capture, perhaps in an effort to escape. God, what's really going on here? What are you up to? and Why?

Another question: why did we ever stop using Rolleiflex cameras?

All photos stolen from vivianmaier.com. Film website here.