The strange case of Vivian Maier

The work of Vivian Maier reminds us of how close to the edge we are. For many years a nanny in New York and Chicago, she left an archive of something like 150,000 photographs when she died in 2009 at age 83, and has become an emblem of the hidden life, the native talent, the multitudes we all contain.

That this story is both true and, in the most fundamental sense, constructed is entirely the point, for Maier’s photographs — street shots for the most part, of pedestrians, passers-by, urban settings — have become a mirror for our own experience rather than a manifestation of hers.

In part, that has to do with the almost accidental nature of her discovery: two years before her death, Marvin Heiferman writes in “Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found” (HarperDesign: 288 pp., $80), “the contents of five storage lockers she had failed to keep up payments on were purchased by Roger Gunderson, a Chicago auctioneer. He then divided up the boxes filled with Maier’s clothes, books, personal effects, and photographic work into multiple lots and sold them off to the highest bidder.”

Among the purchasers was John Maloof, a real estate broker who “paid $380 and walked out the door of RPN Sales with about thirty thousand of Maier’s negatives and some of her ephemera.” It is due to Maloof that Maier has become a phenomenon, with gallery shows, a documentary, and now this exquisite collection.

Still, if “[b]y default, he became the chief curator of artifacts from Maier’s life,” others have also laid claim to her legacy, including a collector named Ron Slattery, who bought both prints and something like 1,200 rolls of undeveloped film. In a piece posted last July on the website Hyperallergenic, Jillian Steinhauer touches on some of the tensions around the issue of who controls, or speaks for, the photographer, noting that Slattery’s prints and negatives seem “to have disappeared from the ‘official’ Maier story.”

All of that, I suppose, is only to be expected; there’s money at stake now. More to the point, though, is the uncomfortable reality that Maier’s work almost slipped through the cracks. Divvied up into lots and sold piecemeal, it was detritus, until it was not.

This, by the way, is not a statement on the photos, which are deft, beautiful and (perhaps most important) highly intentional, the work of an artist who knew what she was about. Maier captures slices of life, but more than that: she composes, shapes her images with an provocative mix of detachment and empathy.

The nearly 250 images in “A Photographer Found” offer a cross-section, ranging from New York in the early 1950s to Chicago in the late 1970s, in both color and black and white. On one page, we see a young man, shot from knee to navel, cutoffs high and tight. On the facing page, a photograph from 20 years earlier: another young man, arms crossed, in a suit, kneeling on a set of wooden steps as if in prayer.

These are not candids, not exactly, and yet if the subjects are aware of the photographer as a presence, they allow her to reveal them nonetheless. The same is true of Maier’s self-portraits, which, shot in mirrors, windows, cigarette machines, season the collection like some odd spice, reminding us that she is always there, always selecting, while at the same time also always separate, held apart from the scene by the intercession of the lens.

It all feels so inevitable — except that, of course, it is not. Instead, it is sheer luck, serendipity, that these images survive. In her life, as in her art, Maier kept her distance, making images that remained private, art that stayed unknown. It reminds me that, much like the people she photographed, most of us pass through life undistinguished, unremarked, unremembered, our great loves and great losses unshared, unfelt, unknown.

And yet, isn’t that the point of art, to exist on its own terms, to evoke in us the here and now? The same might be said about the work of Angelo Rizzuto, another anonymous photographer, who, in the years between 1952 and 1966, went into the streets of New York every day at 2 p.m. to shoot what he saw.

Upon his death in 1967, Rizzuto “left 60,000 photographs … to the Library of Congress”; a selection are preserved in the 2006 book “Angel’s World.” Like Maier, he was shooting less as an act of reclamation than of self-expression, with the intention not to preserve but to record.

“Maier’s photographs, films, and tapes,” Heiferman tells us, “suggest that the act of recording her experience in the world was central to how she lived in it.” Yes, yes: photography as a living art.

But more than that, her work offers us a lesson, cautionary or otherwise: “to embrace contradiction, to be simultaneously distanced and intimate, to balance presence against absence” — or, in other words, to do the work of creativity, of living, in the moment, regardless of the future or the past.

Twitter: @davidulin