Ethical issues have largely been glossed over in favor of a heroic narrative that benefits the people who have been selling her work. We are told that they have saved Vivian Maier from oblivion and have allowed us to own pieces of her legacy. Many people believe that Maier would be pleased with the sharing of her work in this way; yet she plainly chose to not share it while she was alive. Some feel that Maier would have destroyed her work if she didn’t want it to be found; one writer has even suggested that she had saved it for us.
I have looked carefully at tens of thousands of Vivian Maier’s images. I have walked in her footsteps. I have delved the archives in search of everything we might know about Vivian Maier and her work. As I entered the world of her photographs, a different person emerged for me than the one who was shaped for the public imagination. I also learned about Maier’s development as a photographer and her life as an independent woman. She cultivated an air of mystery, but she no longer seems like a “mystery woman” to me.
This book is a counterpoint, a counternarrative, and a corrective to the public depiction of Vivian Maier and her work that emerged through five photo books that were published between 2011 and 2014, drawing on two separate collections of Maier’s photography, one belonging to John Maloof and the other to Jeffrey Goldstein. Each book was larger than the last. Hundreds of her pictures also appeared in documentaries about her. Altogether, the books and movies reproduced more than a thousand images— possibly illegally. In addition, Vivian Maier’s photography has spread across every social network site and countless individual blogs.