Vivian Maier biographer Pamela Bannos tells the story of Maier’s enthusiasm for her new camera being so noticeable that someone in the village speculated that the young American woman with a camera might actually be a spy. Vivian found herself questioned by French police about her photography activities.
How did she take that? Being questioned by police on accusations of being a spy might either be funny or frightening. It appears as though the small town gossip and the encounter with the gendarmerie tickled the 25 year old American woman in Saint Bonnet en Champsaur selling her house.
“I’m sort of a spy,” Vivian Maier later told a man in Chicago who asked her what she did, it was revealed in the documentary “Finding Vivian Maier”. Vivian’s humour extended to her acquiring a European accent of indeterminable origin, perfectly natural and easy for a native New Yorker who grew up in Saint Bonnet, south-western France with her mother’s family.
“I’m sort of a spy” – Vivian Maier
Vivian had spent her youth travelling backwards and forwards between New York and Saint Bonnet en Champsaur, and could speak French well enough to be understood, but still, the experience of being confronted by the police may have been terrifying.
We can only speculate what Vivian Maier was going on in the little French village with her mother’s family while she sold her inherited estate, 15 hectares of land with a building.
Vivian’s estranged mother had been disinherited by her grand-aunt after the failed marriage, and this would have been gossip in the village of only 1,180 people, many of her own family.
Perhaps Vivian’s new found interest in photography was an escape from the reality of her situation. It is worth noting Vivian Maier was using her new-found hobby of photography to record the world around her as she saw it while taking her mind off the troubles in her surroundings.
Right from the genesis, Vivian was approaching her photography as an artist and was also dabbling in documentary and the photo essay, rather than pictorialist or reportage. Vivian Maier spent the years 1950 and 1951 in France until the estate sold and she returned to the USA in late 1951.
Other commentators have rightly pointed out that her French heritage would have influenced her way of seeing, her photographer’s eye. Vivian has been closely to Robert Frank, and other European influenced way of seeing the world. One could speculate whether she choose the job of nanny because it gave her access to children, her favourite subject as a photographer.
Commentators have pointed to Vivian’s aloofness as a character trait, as a possible flaw. Sometimes people don’t choose photography, it chooses them, and many photographers who make a living from their art are very proud and recognise the detached flâneur attitude of the photographer life. it must have been wonderful going through life knowing that your mastery of photography was amongst the world’s best.
“I’m sort of a spy” – Vivian Maier
Related stories
“Packing Up” by Vivian Maier in New York, 1955
Vivian Maier Vintage Photography Auction Bargains
Vivian Maier gives a photography lesson in exposure
Vivian Maier was Phil Donahue’s nanny
The copyright of Vivian Maier’s street photography
Vivian Maier gives a photography lesson in exposure
Was courtesan Mata Hari really a spy?
Andre Kertesz, a pioneer of street & fine art photography
Sebastião Salgado lens on Humanity’s Struggle and Resilience
Brecht’s Man Equals Man by Theatre of the Deaf
Heinrich Hoffman photographs Adolf Hitler public speaking
Photography Appraisals, Auction Agent and Authentication
Dorothea Lange’s Pioneering Approach to Portraiture
State Library of New South Wales 20th Century photography
The first photograph taken in Australia was by Captain Lucas
Australia’s first professional photographer George B Goodman
The oldest surviving Daguerreotype in Australia, 1845
Photographer Paul Dubotzki in Australia’s WWI Internment Camps
Stanley Kubrick career as a still photographer
