Review by Choice Review
During most of her adult life Vivian Maier (1926-2009) worked as a nursemaid for wealthy families in New York City and Chicago. But during that time she was also a relatively indifferent but indefatigable, even obsessive, photographer, and in her lifetime she took more than 100,000 photographs. These she stored in commercial storage lockers, and the lockers were auctioned off just as she lost control of her life to age, illness, and ultimately death. Her mysterious personal history, the huge trove of "found" images taken from the 1950s onward, the photographic community's interest in feminism and its discovery of value in vernacular imagery, the explosion of market value in photographs as high art objects--all conjointly worked to generate a cottage industry in marketing Maier's works, including websites, dozens of exhibitions in art galleries, a half-dozen monographs, and at least one documentary film. These were marred by small inaccuracies and myths about Maier, and Bannos (Northwestern Univ.) has performed an almost forensic level of research into Maier's life and times in order to provide both an accurate biography and a revealing document of the consequent evolution of Maier's photographic reputation. Summing Up: Recommended. All readers. --William S. Johnson, George Fox University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
#+ |9781101947296 ~ at age 3, before she could write by hand, Barbara Newhall Follett was banging out words on her parents' Corona. Her first book, a lyrical romp about a child runaway, came out in 1927 when she was 12. The Saturday Review of Literature called it "almost unbearably beautiful," and this newspaper deemed it "wonderful." A second book, based on her adventures at sea, earned more accolades just a little over a year later. But at age 15, Follett was arrested in San Francisco after fleeing the suffocating plans of her mother. "I felt I had to have my freedom," she told a reporter. A decade later, Follett walked out of the apartment she was sharing with her husband in Brookline, Mass., evidently seeking freedom once more, this time from her marriage. She was never heard from again. Child prodigies are exotic creatures, each unique and inexplicable. But they have a couple of things in common, as Ann Hulbert's meticulous new book, "Off the Charts," makes clear: First, most Wunderkinds eventually experience some kind of schism with a devoted and sometimes domineering parent. "After all, no matter how richly collaborative a bond children forge with grown-up guides, some version of divorce is inevitable," Hulbert writes. "It's what modern experts would call developmentally appropriate." Second, most prodigies grow up to be thoroughly unremarkable on paper. They do not, by and large, sustain their genius into adulthood. What happens to alter the trajectory of shooting stars like Follett? In "Off the Charts," Hulbert attempts to capture the complicated lives of child prodigies without descending into voyeurism or caricature. She has tried to "listen hard for the prodigies' side of the story," to her great credit. This is an arduous task, and it sometimes shows in the writing, which can be stilted in its reliance on quotes and documentation. But Hulbert's diligence results in a surprising payoff: The best advice for managing a child prodigy may be a wise strategy for parenting any child, including the many, many nonbrilliant ones. Hulbert, The Atlantic's literary editor, wrote her last book, "Raising America," about the tortured history of parenting advice. So she is appropriately wary of preachy morality tales. "My goal isn't to pile on the stark cautionary fare. Nor am I aiming to crack some 'talent code,"' she writes in the prologue for "Off the Charts," to our great relief. Instead, she tries to place each of the boys and girls featured in the book in a specific time and place; their celebrity reveals much about their particular moment in American history. For example, Bobby Fischer's chess prowess might not have been impressive enough for adults to overlook his breathtaking egotism - but for the launching of Sputnik and America's anxiety about creeping Soviet domination in education and science. One era's prodigy is another's anonymous misfit. The book begins with the story of two gifted boys who attended Harvard at the same time, in the early 1900s. Norbert Wiener, a budding philosopher and mathematician, was 14, and William Sidis, a star in linguistics and mathematics, was only 11. They were not friends, which was a shame. Both suffered under the weight of their elders' intellectual expectations, combined with the impossibility of fitting in as boys among men. They were told they were superior, but then punished if they acted like it. Their identities depended on superhuman smarts, which made any academic failure feel like a knife to the heart. Wiener would struggle with depression for the rest of his life, but he did manage to eventually find professional fulfillment at M.I.T., where he helped invent the field of cybernetics. Sidis was not so successful; after fleeing a criminal charge related to a political protest, he did low-level accounting work in New York. He continued to alienate others with his stubborn arrogance before dying at 46 of a cerebral hemorrhage. What would have helped these boys and the other struggling prodigies in this book? Maybe nothing. But after poring over their words and stories, Hulbert has concluded that they might all offer parents similar advice: Accept who they are. That doesn't mean protecting them from failure or stress; quite the opposite. "What they want, and need, is the chance to obsess on their own idiosyncratic terms - to sweat and swerve, lose their balance, get their bearings, battle loneliness, discover resilience," Hulbert writes. Interestingly, this is the same advice contemporary psychologists tend to give to all parents, not just the parents of prodigies. Parents must hold children accountable and help them thrive, which is easier said than done; but if they try to re-engineer the fundamentals of their offspring, they will fail spectacularly, sooner or later. And this lesson is particularly obvious in the extremes. "Extraordinary achievement, though adults have rarely cared to admit it, takes a toll," Hulbert writes. "It demands an intensity that rarely makes kids conventionally popular or socially comfortable. But if they get to claim that struggle for mastery as theirs, in all its unwieldiness, they just might sustain the energy and curiosity that ideally fuels such a quest." THE SPECIAL CHALLENGE for prodigies IS that they are exceptional in more ways than one. "Genius is an abnormality, and abnormalities do not come one at a time," explains Veda Kaplinsky, a longtime teacher of gifted students, in Andrew Solomon's "Far From the Tree," a book that is cited by Hulbert. "Many gifted kids have A.D.D. or O.C.D. or Asperger's. When the parents are confronted with two sides of a kid, they're so quick to acknowledge the positive, the talented, the exceptional; they are often in denial over everything else." The very traits that make prodigies so successful in one arena - their obsessiveness, a stubborn refusal to conform, a blistering drive to win - can make them pariahs in the rest of life. Whatever else they may say, most teachers do not in fact appreciate creativity and critical thinking in their own students. "Off the Charts" is jammed with stories of small geniuses being kicked out of places of learning. Matt Savage spent two days in a Boston-area Montessori preschool before being expelled. Thanks to parents who had the financial and emotional resources to help him find his way, he is now, at age 25, a renowned jazz musician. Interestingly, some prodigies may actually do better when their eccentricities are seen by loving adults as disabilities first - and talents second. Hulbert tells the story of Jacob Barnett, born in 1998, who withdrew into autism as a toddler in Indiana. His parents tried every form of therapy they could find, before finally discovering that he could be drawn out through his captivation with astronomy. His mother, Kristine, took him to astronomy classes at the local university - not to jumpstart his genius but to help coax him back to life. "If I had stopped and let myself bask in the awe of Jake's amazing abilities - if I had stopped to ponder how unusual he really is - I don't think I could have been a good mother to him," she explained. The most vivid section of the book comes at the end, when Hulbert reunites with the musical prodigy Marc Yu, a decade after first interviewing him at age 6. With his mother's support, Yu had tried to ease up on his musical career and live a more normal life, an approach that had worked for other prodigies, including the child actress Shirley Temple. But Yu found that the strategies that worked at the keyboard were useless in high school, where no amount of discipline and focus could make him cool. The adorable, joke-cracking boy she'd remembered had grown into a lonely teenager. "I always expected things to go my way," Yu told Hulbert. "If I wanted it, I worked hard enough, I got it, and people loved me. That's no longer true, and I feel I exist in the shadow of popular kids." Yu's story reinforces one of Hulbert's central, if unsatisfying, findings: Children's needs change. If you think you've got a child figured out, you will be proved wrong momentarily. As Hulbert writes: "Prodigies offer reminders writ large that children, in the end, flout our best and worst intentions." And adults always overestimate their own influence. amanda ripley is a senior fellow at the Emerson Collective and the author, most recently, of "The Smartest Kids in the World."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 21, 2018]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The story of the so-called nanny photographer made Vivian Maier an international sensation, but as Bannos, an associate arts professor at Northwestern University, observes in this assiduously researched and riveting biography, the glossy books and documentary film that first recounted Maier's life and showcased her photographs were primarily created by the men who purchased the vast archives found in her Chicago storage units in 2007 after she stopped paying the bills and realized they had acquired potentially lucrative treasures. Bannos tacks between fully chronicling Maier's fiercely independent and creatively intrepid life and thoroughly investigating the sale of her photographs and the questions raised about who has the right to profit from them. Bannos poignantly reveals the struggles of Maier's grandmother Eugenie, who left her remote French village for New York after having her daughter, Maria, out of wedlock, then thrived as a live-in cook, to Maria's work as a maid and her disastrous marriage. Born in New York in 1926, Maier survived a difficult childhood there and in France (where her heirs were eventually located), committed herself to photography, and took up domestic work to support herself and her art. Taking measure of the barriers women face, Bannos portrays Maier as nothing less than a consummate, prolific, world-traveling, uncompromising, and fearless artist.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2017 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bannos, a professor at Northwestern University, constructs a meticulously researched counternarrative to the public depiction of photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009) as a reclusive Chicago nanny who moonlighted as a street photographer. Bannos argues that Maier's work has been overshadowed by the unconventional backstory of how her photographs first came to prominence. In 2007, a real estate agent named John Maloof bought a large box of Maier's negatives from the storage facility that 81-year-old Maier could no longer afford to rent. Maier's work gained traction online after Maloof uploaded scans to Flickr, leading to a "Maier industrial complex." In the span of four years, Maier's photographs were published in five photo books, exhibited in galleries in Los Angeles and New York City, and were the subject of an Academy Award-nominated documentary. The book follows Maier, who died in 2009, from her nomadic and tense early family life to her early photography in France to her Rolleiflex work on the streets of New York and her secretive life photographing the streets of Chicago. Bannos's biography is a vital contribution to understanding the historical relevance of Maier's work and an important challenge to the way in which Maier's work and legacy have been represented thus far. 30 halftones. (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Vivian Maier (1926-2009) was a prolific, skillful photographer who took thousands of photographs during her lifetime. Her work was not discovered until after her death, when the contents of her storage units-including hundreds of thousands of negatives-were sold at auction. Since then, her images have been widely disseminated through social media, exhibitions, books, even a full-length, award-winning documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier (2013). Because Maier chose not to show her photographs during her lifetime and left no heirs, her story and estate have been tangled in mystery and controversy. Presently, several men have claim to her images and have profited by not only selling her photos but also perpetuating the Maier "myth." By carefully analyzing the artist's images, -Bannos (photography, Northwestern Univ.) skillfully tracks her entire adult life: work history, where she lived and traveled, and her interests, and is able to look past the mystique of the "eccentric nanny with a camera" to tell the true -Maier story. The number of photographs here is limited to 30, but the book's strengths are Bannos's exhaustive research and her ability to connect the greater history of photography into the account of Maier's curious life. VERDICT This extraordinary work is recommended for all art history and photography enthusiasts.-Shauna Frischkorn, Millersville Univ., PA © Copyright 2017. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Biography of a secretive photographer who became legendary after her death.In 2007, Vivian Maier (1926-2009) failed to make payments on five storage lockers in Chicago, causing the owner to offer its contentshundreds of boxesat auction. The boxes contained material from decades of hoarding: books, magazines, newspapers, and, most astonishingly, photographsalbums, prints, negatives, color slides, and more than 1,000 rolls of undeveloped film. By the time Maier died two years later, two of the buyers, Jeffrey Goldstein and real estate businessman John Maloof, already had initiated what was to become a lucrative "Vivian Maier Industrial Complex," selling, exhibiting, and promoting Maier's photographs and turning her into a celebrity. In her debut biography, Bannos (Art Theory and Practice/Northwestern Univ.) offers a cleareyed investigation of Maier's life, aiming to penetrate the myths surrounding her and to assess her stature as an artist. In a website, several monographs, and a movie, Maloof significantly shaped the myth of Maier as "a mysterious French nanny who was also, secretly, a photographer." Although Maloof did not cooperate with Bannos in her research, the thousands of images he published on his website supplemented more than 20,000 images from other collections, which Bannos attentively analyzed. Maier did earn a living as a nanny in New York and Chicago, but her work as a photographer dominated her life. Even when she had children in her care, she hung a camera around her neck and engaged in "purposeful" sightseeing in the U.S. and abroad. She refused to exhibit her photographs, though, and she "selectively, sometimes imaginatively, addressed any questions about her past." Families who employed her found her eccentric, demanding, opinionated and, as she aged, paranoid. In alternating chapters, Bannos juxtaposes Maier's biography with her afterlife. She effectively contextualizes Maier's aesthetics within the history of photography, and she makes a persuasive case for her talent and originality. In the end, though, the author is left with unanswered questions about Maier's personal life, her motivations to photograph, and her artistic aims. A sympathetic portrait of an artist who remains elusive. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
