by Paul Smith
When I heard there was an exhibit of Vivian Maier’s color photos at the Chicago Historical Museum, I went to see what she had captured on film. As an art form, photography is unique. It captures us. It can show us at our best, our worst, and more importantly at our most candid selves. There are many famous photographers. For name recognition I think Ansel Adams is at the top of the list for his landscape photography in the United States. I like Vivian Maier the most because she got us when we weren’t posing. Yosemite Valley and the Grand Tetons are always posing. That’s what they do. Ansel Adams knew this. Vivian Maier’s shots snuck up on us and caught us unexpectedly. She snagged a stern old man, a happy guy leaning forward, two black girls eating ice cream bars, a toddler bawling on the sidewalk, two tough guys getting into a taxi.
So I went to the exhibit. It was as advertised – a collection of Vivian’s photos, this time in color. The subjects were pretty much the same as in her black and white work – people on the streets of New York and Chicago and elsewhere. She got a small Asian girl sleeping against a car window, commuters waiting for a bus in the Chicago Loop while a movie marquee behind them advertises “Dracula Has Risen From The Grave,” a smiling redhead with a page boy haircut. There were also landscapes of Chicago in what was probably Kodacolor. I went through the entire exhibit on the second floor and left, puzzled.
I was puzzled because I was disappointed.
I denied to myself that I was let down. Wasn’t this the work of Vivian Maier, the famous nanny whose work was loved by nearly everyone? Yes, but something was missing. This was the problem. And the work was in color, so there should have been more of “something” in it than in her black and whites.
But there wasn’t. These polychromatic images lacked something that was in the black and white versions. And that something was our imagination. When you stare at a black and white picture you are not distracted by the variety of colors, the colors you see every day. Your eyes yearn for something, and you add your own vision to the photo, adding by speculation to what is developed in black and white and gray, most especially gray, because there are so many grays. Some of the images become sinister, as if something is happening but you don’t know what it is, Mr. Jones. And if not sinister, then more vulnerable as facial expressions are coaxed to reveal themselves by that army of gray. The end result is that black and white pictures, for me anyway, do not contain less than color photos, they have more. And that contradicts our senses.
Thinking about this, I wondered if this was an isolated phenomenon, one in which “less is more,” or if it was common in our interior or exterior world. Was there anything that related to me where less of something was bigger and better than more of it?
I went back to the starting point of Vivian Maier’s children photos – a proud girl with folded arms, four children on a street corner with a stroller, broom and balloon. I could relate to them. We had a son, and then grandchildren. We were now seniors with a lifetime dealing with greenhorns in this pilgrimage. Having gone through the first leg of the journey raising our son, we had a pretty good idea of what worked and what didn’t. Without over-generalizing, the one thing that seemed to not work out was – talk. That’s quite a contradiction to everything we should have learned. We are taught, and wisely so, that we are here to guide our offspring and warn them of all the dangers that exist – electrical sockets, street crossings, strangers with candy, strangers with cocktails. Yes, of course, we do that. At some point, though, our warnings get to be useless. They fall on deaf ears. I am reminded of the Heisenberg Principle in the study of light. Somewhere it was written, “As you shine light on a sub-atomic particle, the particle reacts to the light and changes its path.” Or, in layman’s terms, the more scrutiny you put on your child, let’s say your teen-age child, the more he/she will do to avoid you/it. Or in my terms, your child will do his/her best to turn off your light. This plays out as squabbles become skirmishes and showdowns turn into wars. At some point we may be inclined to ask is it worth it? If the issue is their safety, a donnybrook is always worth it, but in smaller matters, talk just divides us. Many times silence works best. They are watching more than they listen. My theory works well with adults, too, especially ones whose blather has become tiresome. The added bonus is that some of these bores will just walk away when we don’t respond to their talk/malarkey.
My favorite Vivian Maier photo is a black and white of two girls playing in a nearly vacant parking lot. A sign behind them says Entrepot. Google tells me this is a warehouse. The girls are waving sticks in the air, waving them so fast they are blurs. The shot is spontaneous, and the girls are not hampered or compromised by the camera’s presence. A car in back has a dented door. The girls wear half-open coats, so it is cold out. None of that matters. The girls have the one thing that does matter – each other’s company. They are laughing. Nothing else counts – not their parents, not the warehouse owner, not the camera, not us. Because I am not distracted by the color of their coats or faces, I imagine peering into them and seeing a happiness I would never scrutinize or intrude on or fool with.
They wouldn’t listen anyway.
Paul Smith writes poetry & fiction. He lives near Chicago, has been published in the Rockford Review, Oyez, Thieving Magpie, Packingtown Review and others. He likes taking the bus around Chicago. He is a proud member of Rockford Writers Guild.
After the Art 