Five stars for my favorite Vivian Maier, and one star for the director's sloppy filming and editing and his ambition to sell the concept to make money.
As Susan Sontag said in Photography, “The particular qualities and intentions of photographs tend to be swallowed up in the generalized pathos of time past. Aesthetic distance seems built into the very experience of looking at photographs, if not right away, then with the passage of time. Time eventually positions most photographs, even the very amateurish, at the level of art.”
Always independent, always moving through the world, she invented herself—and then was reinvented through selective presentations of her photography and representations by people whose paths she crossed. Maier came into the world as part of a family that nearly immediately broke apart. At the end of her life, a similar outward spread of her innumerable possessions landed all over the world.
Vivian Maier is a collective invention. And her story continues on without her.
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