Vivian Maier Street photographer

VIVIAN MAIER, who worked mostly in domestic service, mostly in Chicago, was a serious photographer who shot some 100,000 images over upward of 40 years. Although those who knew her - primarily the children in her care; she had no real intimates - were aware that she took pictures, she never published or exhibited them, and rarely showed them to others. Her work came to general attention only when, in 2007, two years before her death, five storage lockers on which she had failed to keep up payments were emptied and their contents auctioned off. By the time the buyers realized what they had on their hands, she had died. John Maloof, who bought most of it, put up a selection of scans on a website, which immediately went viral; Maier posthumously became a media sensation. Maloof's VIVIAN MAIER: A Photographer Found (Harper Design, $80), with text by Marvin Heiferman, is already the fifth book of her photographs to have been published. It's an appealing story, made even better by how good the pictures are. She was a street photographer, with an astringent sense of humor, an intense curiosity about people and a keen eye for the fluctuations of popular culture. She was not, it should be noted, strikingly original. The earlier photos, from the 1950s, look like the work of a very gifted student of the Photo League, although they lack, say, the inclusive intimacy of Sid Grossman's street shots or the uncanny perfection of Helen Levitt's framing. The pictures of the '60s and '70s give abundant evidence that she studied the work of Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand and Lee Friedlander, among others, but don't really take their ideas any further. More significant, the pictures we see, here and elsewhere, are printed full frame from her negatives, as opposed to those she made herself, "often indifferently printed and cropped to extract the more obvious details from bigger and more complex pictures," as Heiferman points out in his superb introduction. Some are even from rolls she never got around to developing. And she did not edit her work, nor - despite the mountain of paper documents found with her pictures - did she leave any written notes concerning it. Then again, her self-portraits are her signature. She drops her shadow deliberately, usually on desolate backdrops, while she finds her reflection in every reflective surface. A tall, studious, sensibly dressed figure, even when she is not peering down at the ground glass of her Rolleiflex, she manages to stand at the center of the image while somehow at the same time receding from it. Which is fitting, since the images can be considered as both made by her and not. Photography, uniquely, is a two-way street. Because so much of the photography of the past is anonymous or nearly so, generally lacking in documentation of any kind, intentionality is often beside the point, since it is unknowable. In such cases the burden of the creative act is partly assumed by the viewer, who sees things in the picture the photographer may or may not have intended. Vivian Maier certainly saw those full frames when she looked through her viewfinder - or did she? Was her boldness on the street countered by a timidity that overcame her in the darkroom? Maybe her creative process went only so far because she had no ready prospects for publication or exhibition. She will remain an enigma, but she left a vast trove of images that at the very least constitute a sidelong panorama of the late 20th century. By contrast, Henri Cartier-Bresson is a photographer about whom we know a great deal. He was active for some 70 years, widely published and highly articulate. And yet Clément Chéroux's HENRI CARTIER-BRESSON: Here and Now (Thames & Hudson, $75), the catalog of a major retrospective held at the Pompidou Center in Paris earlier this year, manages to somewhat reconfigure his life. You might have the impression that Cartier-Bresson's career broke neatly into two parts: one before the war, when he was a daring photographic Surrealist; the other after, when he became a globe-trotting photojournalist, making lapidary tableaus of catastrophic news events that sometimes appear too perfect - too lacquered or monumental - for their own good. Chéroux disposes of this dichotomy in several ways. He both demonstrates that social concern was a feature of Cartier-Bresson's work from the beginning and, by including a great many lesser-known, non-magazine pictures, shows that his modernist panache never went away. He also places the famous later photos in much fuller context - for example, by including all the other shots in a sequence known for a single "decisive moment" - which rejuvenates pictures we are used to seeing as deracinated icons. Along the way he pays attention to many half-neglected aspects of Cartier-Bresson's life and photography, like his work in film, primarily for Jean Renoir; his prewar contributions to newspapers, such as the series of moving "lost child" photos he made in 1937; and his war re- cord: He escaped from German P.O.W. camps three times, and was not recaptured on the third attempt. Paul Strand's career also lends itself to a before-and-after schematic. The tyro Pictorialist to whom Alfred Stieglitz devoted an entire issue of Camera Work, when Strand was just 26, underwent a political conversion in the 1930s and thereafter dedicated himself to investigations of communities, largely rural and largely impoverished, in Mexico, New England, France, Italy, the Hebrides, Egypt and Ghana. Still, as Peter Barberie and Amanda N. Bock show in their PAUL STRAND: Master of Modern Photography (Yale University, $75), this division, too, is reductive. After all, Strand began photographing as a student at the Ethical Culture School in New York under the guidance of the great humanist Lewis Hine, and while his 1916 breakthrough pictures are much concerned with the curves of bowls and the rhythms of picket fences, they also searched the faces of the poor, in close-ups that are hugely empathetic (even if they were shot with a periscopio lens). And while he was actively involved in left-wing projects and organizations beginning in the 1930s, he never made work that could be dismissed as propaganda. Social justice, for him, could not be separated from the cause of beauty, which he sought and found in faces and ruined barns and gardens and human accommodations to the elements. He was a lover of the world. One of his contemporary heirs is Eugene Richards, who has devoted books to, among other subjects, poverty in America, the effects of crack cocaine, emergency rooms, 9/11, mental illness, veterans of the Iraq war and the death of his companion Dorothea Lynch from cancer. Nevertheless he has always located beauty in the midst of the suffering, not as a means of papering anything over but as a justification for living. He first began taking pictures as a Vista volunteer in the Arkansas Delta from 1969, and in RED BALL OF A SUN SLIPPING DOWN (Many Voices, $50) - which was funded through a Kickstarter campaign - he revisits the cotton fields and sharecroppers' dwellings and contrasts the black-and-white photos from then with the color shots from now. Trailers have replaced wooden shacks, and the gun-toting straw bosses may no longer be in evidence, but generally things do not seem to have changed much at all, and indeed you may find yourself flipping back to certain pictures to ascertain whether they date from this decade or 40 years ago. Richards's running text, an account of his halting interactions with an older woman named Porter Lee, is undated, and could fit into either chronology. The pain and deprivation are overwhelming, but the people are beautiful, as are the skies, dogs, trees. Richards's first book about the place was called "Few Comforts or Surprises," and the same title could apply again. Ambivalence is the keynote struck by Shomei Tomatsu's CHEWING GUM AND CHOCOLATE (Aperture, $80), edited by Leo Rubinfien and John Junkerman, an artfully sequenced collection of his photographs of the American military presence in Japan, 1959-80. Tomatsu, whose grainy, smeared, often wide-angle black-and-white images evoke a spectrum of feelings, from nostalgic reverie to smoldering anger, sometimes within the same photograph, influenced an entire generation of Japanese photographers, most notably Daido Moriyama. The pictures here, never before collected into a single volume, do not invite facile responses as they chronicle military bases and their effluvia in a period that has the Vietnam War at its center: bars, prostitution, mixed-race children, outsize cars, Japanese hepcats in pimp suits, American children wielding toy ray guns, dish antennas, graffiti, demonstrations, military aircraft coming in low over a junkyard, random shards of tradition and ritual, African-American G.I.s giving the black-power salute, a narrow street of old single-story frame dwellings that is lined with pawnshop signs in English. Almost every picture could be the beginning of a long, densely packed personal narrative. There is almost too much to take in among the numerous and wildly assorted contributions to AMÉRICA LATINA: Photographs 1960-2013 (Fondation Cartier Pour l'Art Contemporain/Museo Amparo, $45), which after all covers work from an entire embattled region over half a century. Unsurprisingly given its origins, a vast majority of the work surveyed is devoted to social and political protest and intervention; much of it employs paraphotographic methods: collage, manipulation, photocopying, rephotography; a great deal requires explication for the foreign viewer. For example, Claudia Andujar's portraits of Yanomami Indians in Brazil with numbered tags around their necks are powerful in their own right, but they gain more depth when you learn that the tags indicate their wearers have been vaccinated against the diseases brought in by miners encroaching on their territory, and yet more when you discover that Andujar's father died in Dachau. Facundo de Zuviría's Buenos Aires storefronts are initially charming and colorful, but as you turn the pages these are succeeded by monochrome, nearly identical shop fronts with armored blinds rolled down - those were taken after Argentina's financial crisis. Some of the tactics employed by conceptual artists are here put to more pointed uses, for example Johanna Calle's gelatin silver prints, entirely blank but for a typed caption at the bottom. They are blank because she wanted the viewer to imagine the subjects, murder cases drawn from Colombian state archives. The blurry snapshots mounted on notebook paper with scrawled captions by Marcelo Brodsky look like the evocations of childhood that they are, but with a violent recoil: Their subjects, friends of the photographer, were "disappeared" by the Argentine junta in the late 1970s. Given all this, it is puzzling that the editors undermine the strength of the collection by including, near the end, a selection of lightweight Pop-ish exercises that threaten to downgrade all that has come before. Even more vast in its range is William A. Ewing's LANDMARK: The Fields of Landscape Photography (Thames & Hudson, $65), which covers the world and then some: Among its hundreds of photographs are pictures taken of and from outer space. But variety - topical, procedural, attitudinal - is the point. Nothing in the universe is alien to landscape photography, the book argues, from Philippe Chancel's view of the construction of the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, which looks like a cover illustration from a 1950s science-fiction pulp, to Eiger Esser's hazy scene on the Sacramento River, which looks like a sepia-tone 19th-century panorama of the Nile. The subject, however, is the present, and the present is mostly alarming. Marcus Lyon's depiction of Cape Flats, South Africa, is a perpendicular aerial view, bisected by a highway, with the left half apparently untouched woods and river and the right half a township whose houses are jammed together so tightly their roofs look like stones in a wall. There are pictures of war, of war re-enactments, of psychedelic-looking heavy-metal tailings, of ecological collapse. There are fictional landscapes made with Photoshop, and there are landscapes that look fictional but aren't - Walter Niedermayr's vast scene of many evenly spaced skiers on a single slope is, against all appearances, neither movie magic nor a diorama populated by miniatures. The book delivers a pair of oddly coupled messages: The planet is in deep trouble, and its trauma makes for eye candy. LUC SANTE'S "The Other Paris" will be published in 2015.