I saw in this morning's paper that the new movie, "Finding Vivian Maier" was out in Philly in one of the art-houses starting today and it turned out, not surprisingly for this kind of film, it's also available on Comcast "on demand". So I "demanded" it and just finished watching it.
Kind of interesting, but more in terms of the mystery of who this woman was than in terms of the photography, of which there's not much more than fleeting glances and a few interviews with other photographers. It seems she was a deeply troubled person, a head case really, who, by today's standards, really abused some of the kids she was charged with caring for (who are interviewed at length). But who had an obsession and a really good eye to go with it. And it sounded like she did make an aborted attempt or two to have some of her work printed and maybe even shown, but she really didn't have the ability to follow through on that. She was a collector and hoarder but she never really had a place of her own to hoard stuff in, which must have been deeply frustrating. But she had trunks full of negatives and it seems she knew they were damn good. And she saved just enough cards and letters and receipts and cassette tapes and 8mm movies for the kid (Maloof) who found her stuff to piece together many of the details of her life, to find a surviving cousin in a small village in France, etc. An interesting profile and detective story about a woman who really left a hell of a legacy behind.
I'll leave the rest for those of you who plan to watch it. There's another movie out on iTunes and Amazon streaming called "The Mystery of Vivian Maier" and I have no idea how it differs from this new one - I think it was a BBC production that came out sometime last year.
One final thing. The way the guy who found her negatives realized he was onto something real was via Flickr. He'd sent samples to museums and galleries and got no encouragement but when he started posting some of her photos on Flickr, they immediately went viral and the whole thing took off from there. So, say what you will about Flickr, it's a good place to expose photography to a good sized cross section of photographers and it was instrumental in allowing this particular cream to rise to the top...
-Ray