Call Them Sisters - Call Them Brothers

A recently produced documentary film on the photographer Vivian Maier is shown all around the world. In the wake Maier rapidly rises to popularity, maybe even to stardom. Rightfully so: it sinks in now - with ever more pictures published - that we are faced with a totally unique photographic oeuvre. Created by a person who apparently hardly ever showed a picture to anyone!
In the 1950s Edward Steichen put together the renowned exhibition "Family Of Man" with pictures by many of the world's best photographers. I dare say that Vivian Maier reaches a similar impact all on her own...

When I listened to "Call Them Brothers" by Regina Spektor and Only Son for the first time, for some reason Maier's pictures came to my mind. The song is likely a comment on the present, yet the lyrics reflect heavily on the past. Even Maier's pictures possess this dual quality: they are tightly niched period-documents and at the same time exposés of the human condition beyond time and place. Listening to the song provided the impulse to fit these images into a little show.



I'm aware of the fact that zooming and panning in a picture tampers with the original composition of a photograph. But this little liberty can serve the purpose of drawing attention to important properties of the image. Plus, the introduction of some motion effects may prevent younger people from loosing interest a bit too quickly... And in the end, when we stand face to face with photographs at an exhibition, nobody will mourn the absence of presentation effects. Our eyes do a great job exploring, and - on top of that - in an unmatched individual way.
Maier's pictures have the impact on me that I feel somewhat differently about the recent past, the 50s and 60s. These decades assume a new "human" vibrancy, an "alive" feeling. Many facets of social and private life reach us in a straightforward way. Even people born much later seem to be receptive to the communicative strength of Maier's photographs.

November 2014
We had a formidable Vivian Maier exhibition in Gothenburg's Hasselblad Gallery, a division of the Art Museum. I visited at least four times (= one visit gives you a year-pass!). Never before have I seen so many people at a photo exhibition, many young people, art students, High School classes etc. And nobody seemed bored!

I was totally flabbergasted, even by the technical quality of the prints. True, the exhibited enlargements so rich in tonality were not done by Maier herself, but they could not have been made without perfectly exposed negatives. You also saw the amazing accuracy of focus and an overall sharpness stemming from an iron-steady grip on the camera during exposure. How could she accomplish this, given all these quick-response street-situations?

Nearly all Maier's black and white pictures were taken with a German twin-lens ROLLEIFLEX, and I myself am the proud owner of one. Well, together with my wife that is, we inherited it from her mother, Lillan Haraldsson. Over the years Lillan took hundreds and hundreds of pictures with her ROLLEIFLEX, bought in Berlin 1938, on her way to North Africa by car! It was her honeymoon trip.

Our Rolleiflex from 1938

Once in my hands during the 80's, I found the camera to be in perfect working order. At the time I was a fairly experienced 35 mm SLR user. The much larger negative format of the ROLLEIFLEX, comparable to a large sensor today with a very high megapixel resolution, enticed me to go out and have a photographic field-day. Or so I thought...
To begin with, there was no exposure metering. A seperate light meter was not at hand, so it was back to the little instructional sheet that came with every film package, telling you what settings to use in sunshine, cloudy, overcast etc conditions. The ground glass image in the viewfinder shows unsharpness and sharpness, but it wasn't like today's LCDs, it was a sadly dim performance, the interpretation of which further hampered by the mirror reversal sideways. Both focus and exposure were difficult to achieve. The mirror reversal slowed you down in your compositional efforts. I soon gave up, realizing that my Minoltas were far more advanced. True, they were, but they could never produce images as rich and detailed as a ROLLEIFLEX.
How did Vivian do it? I don't know. She must have been some determined woman. One New York researcher claims to have evidence that Vivian after acquisition of her first ROLLEIFLEX did not take a picture for one year. What was she doing? Learning to handle the camera? Taking test pictures at various exposures etc which she later destroyed? More facts can come to light, but it is also possible that she may have taken the secret of her amazing photographic mastery into the grave.