In 2007 a storage unit on the north side of Chicago was auctioned because the rent had stopped being paid. Inside were tens of thousands of negatives, rolls of film that had never been developed, prints, tape recordings and reels of 8mm film. They belonged to a woman called Vivian Maier, who had spent around forty years working as a nanny in the suburbs, and who was still alive when her boxes were sold to three separate buyers who did not know what they had.
In short · 4 min read
- Vivian Maier left up to 150,000 negatives, most of them never shown.
- Saul Leiter photographed in colour for decades before the art world accepted it.
- The looking may have been the point, and the photograph what it left behind.
She died in April 2009. That October one of the buyers posted a set of her pictures online and they went round the world in a few days. She had left somewhere between a hundred thousand and a hundred and fifty thousand negatives behind her. As far as anyone has been able to establish, she showed almost none of them to anybody.
Some of the film had never been developed at all, which quietly rules out the tidiest explanation. A person building an archive for later develops the film. A picture nobody has ever looked at, including the person who took it, is not being saved up for a better moment. Whatever those exposures were for, a good number of them were finished the moment the shutter closed.
Saul Leiter is a slower version of the same puzzle. He began photographing in colour in New York in 1948, and kept at it for decades, largely in the few streets around his apartment. In the early 1960s he and his partner were struggling to pay their rent. His first museum exhibition in Europe came in 2008, when he was in his eighties, at the foundation named after Henri Cartier-Bresson.
The photograph records that noticing. It does not produce it.
Part of what he was working against was a rule about what counted. For most of that period colour was not accepted as a serious medium. Black and white was what art photography was made of, and colour was the language of advertising and family snapshots. It took until 1976, and a show of William Eggleston's photographs at the Museum of Modern Art curated by John Szarkowski, for that to properly shift, and the reviews at the time called the work banal and boring. A number of those critics later said they had got it wrong. Leiter had been making colour photographs for nearly thirty years by then.
It is tempting to file both of them under neglect, as though the world failed to notice and then corrected its mistake. That version puts the audience at the centre of the story, which may be the wrong place for it.
What is harder to explain away is the sheer volume. A hundred and fifty thousand exposures is not a hobby that got out of hand. It is a daily practice, carried on for decades, by somebody with no particular reason to expect an audience and no visible interest in finding one. Whatever kept Maier walking those streets with a camera around her neck on her days off was renewing itself without any of the things we usually assume are doing the renewing.
Which leaves the possibility that the looking was the thing. That the camera was a way of paying attention, and the negative was what fell out of having paid it. This is a practical idea rather than a romantic one. Carrying a camera changes how you walk down a street. You start noticing where the light lands, who is standing where, what is about to happen at the far end of the pavement. The photograph records that noticing. It does not produce it.
Pictures made this way have a particular quality when they finally surface. Nothing in them is angling to be liked. They were not composed with a viewer in mind, so they have none of the small adjustments people make when they know they are being watched, and neither do the photographs. It is one of the reasons Maier's work landed so hard when it appeared. It arrived without any of the usual apparatus of being shown.
Being seen was something that happened to them afterwards, and very nearly did not happen at all.
ClaraXenia's photographs start in the same place, in ordinary streets and ordinary light, before anyone has decided what they are for. The Photo Art comes first and the Word of Intention arrives afterwards, out of whatever the picture turned out to be holding. That order is not a detail. A word chosen first would have to go looking for an image to sit on, and the picture would end up illustrating something rather than revealing it.
Maier's boxes went to auction because a storage bill went unpaid. Had the rent been settled a month earlier, or had the boxes gone to a skip rather than a saleroom, none of this would exist, and the walking and the looking would have happened in exactly the same way. The photographs were already what they were. Being seen was something that happened to them afterwards, and very nearly did not happen at all.
Sources
- Maloof, J. and Siskel, C. (2013). Finding Vivian Maier. Documentary film.
- Szarkowski, J. (1976). William Eggleston's Guide. The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
A quiet extension of this idea
Our pieces are built around this principle. A single word, placed so it naturally comes back into your attention during the day. Not something you have to focus on the whole day, just something that stays with you.
