A Father, a Son, a Disease and a Camera
Credit Cheney Orr
A Peek Into Vivian Maier’s Family Album
Credit Vivian Maier/Collection of Stephen Bulger Gallery
A Peek Into Vivian Maier’s Family Album
This is the second of two articles about research on Vivian Maier. The first was published on Lens on Tuesday.
In the 1950s, when she was in her 20s, Vivian Maier visited a photo studio run by women in Union City, N.J. She had known one of them — Jeanne Bertrand — since she was a child.
When Maier’s maternal grandmother moved to New York from France in 1901, she met a cousin of Bertrand’s. By the time Maier took Bertrand’s portrait at the studio in 1954, the older photographer had been working in the field for more than half a century. Pictured in her hands: Vivian Maier negatives (Slides 2 and 3).
Viewing Vivian Maier on Lens
Here are six previous Lens posts exploring work by Vivian Maier.
This portrait and others suggest much about the artistic development of Maier, a street photographer who doesn’t appear to have made an effort to show her work before she died in 2009 at the age of 83. Not only did Maier know Bertrand, she also went more than once to meet with — and likely to learn from — her and her colleagues, who made careers using their cameras.
These insights come from Ann Marks, a retired business executive who has been researching clues about Maier’s family history. Ms. Marks has had access to Maier’s photos with the help of two of the early champions of Maier’s work, John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein.
Among Ms. Marks’s findings, which she has published online in two parts, are insights into Maier’s turbulent family history. She was born into an unhappy marriage. Her brother, a drug addict who was given different names by the two sides of his family, ultimately received a diagnosis of schizophrenia. By the time Maier was on her own, working as a nanny, it does not appear that she was in touch with her family.
The story of Vivian Maier’s family is significant given a lawsuit about the proper heir to her archive. Some have questioned whether Mr. Maloof and Mr. Goldstein, who have worked separately on their collections, took advantage of Maier’s work. Both have maintained their belief in the importance of sharing Maier’s images.
Among the bigger questions that have been asked of Maier’s work: Why did she keep it a secret? And how did she, a nanny, take such good photographs?
When Maier’s grandmother Eugenie Jaussaud moved to New York, she left her daughter, Marie, who was born out of wedlock, in a convent in France. Jaussaud, who was Roman Catholic, worked as a cook in high-society households. Eventually, her daughter joined her.
In New York, Marie married Charles Maier, who worked at the National Biscuit Company. According to documents, one of the witnesses at their wedding was a church janitor; the other was the pastor’s wife. Their first child, a boy, was born in 1920, baptized Charles in a Catholic church.
Ms. Marks made note of the words “filius naturalis,” which are written on the baptismal record. “Before the eyes of God,” she writes, “Marie declared Charles Jr. illegitimate.” The same baby was baptized a few months later in a Protestant church, under a different name: Karl William Maier Jr.
These pieces of information were hints, in Ms. Marks’s view, that Maier’s parents’ marriage was unhappy early on. By the time Karl was 5, he was placed in the Heckscher Foundation Children’s Home, and later in his grandparents’ custody.
In 1926, Vivian Dorothy Maier was born and baptized Catholic. The following year, her parents separated. At 4, Vivian moved to the Bronx with her mother and Jeanne Bertrand, the photographer. It wasn’t long before Jaussaud took young Vivian to France with Bertrand, leaving Karl behind with his grandparents.
Vivian spent six years of her childhood in France and returned twice as an adult. Richard Cahan wrote about her time there for Lens in 2012, before the publication of his book “Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows,” which we excerpted that year.
Meanwhile, Maier’s parents divorced and her paternal grandfather, William, died. Ms. Marks found a New York Times obituary from Jan. 30, 1936, that called William the “grandfather of Charles von Maier Jr.” The next day, another obituary said he had two grandchildren, “Charles von Maier Jr. and Dorothea Vivian von Maier.”
Karl started getting into trouble after his grandfather died: He was transferred first to a probationary school and later spent three years in the New York Vocational School at Coxsackie. Ms. Marks dug through records at the New York State Archives, which included a number of letters between Karl and his family, as well as letters to and from the staff at the facility.
In letters, Vivian and Karl’s paternal grandmother said that her son was an alcoholic with a gambling problem. Their maternal grandmother spoke disparagingly of her daughter in letters she wrote from the Vanderbilt estate in Florida, where she was working.
“In all of the records from these years, there is virtually no mention of Vivian except by Eugenie,” Ms. Marks said. “Everyone else seemed to treat her like wallpaper.”
Maier spent some time in Queens in the care of a family that fostered children. Later on, her mother moved out of their apartment and a Frenchwoman named Emilie Haugmard became her unofficial guardian. Maier took a series of photos at the beach with Ms. Haugmard, including one in which they stand smiling, side-by-side, in bathing suits (Slide 1).
There are, presumably, dozens of images in Maier’s archives featuring people she cared for — people who had an impact on her as a photographer and as a person. So far, with Ms. Marks’s help, Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Maloof have found only one series of three portraits of the woman they believe to be Maier’s mother. A print of one of those portraits was in the possession of relatives in France.
In her work, one of Maier’s preoccupations was taking photos of older women of the working class — women like her mother and grandmother, “the maternal figures of her youth,” Ms. Marks writes.
Ms. Marks has yet to find records indicating that Maier attended school in the United States. But it’s clear that she fared better than her brother. When he tried to join the Army in 1941, Ms. Marks found, he was rejected because of a criminal record, according to his military record. The next year, he was drafted and discharged dishonorably because of his morphine addiction.
In the years to come, both of Maier’s grandmothers died. Eugenie’s estate was split among Vivian, Carl and Marie, who was then living in a boardinghouse. “Eugenie stipulated that her grandchildren receive payment outright, but that Marie receive a bond with regular, lifetime payments,” Ms. Marks writes, “an official acknowledgment that she didn’t trust her daughter.”
That year, Maier purchased her first camera. She soon returned to the family home in France, where she photographed endlessly: landscapes, local residents and animals. She sold the ancestral home, which had been bequeathed to her by an aunt.
“One of Maier’s preoccupations was taking photos of older women of the working class — women like her mother and her grandmother.”
When Maier went back to France for the last time in 1959 — at the end of an adventurous world tour that included a stop in Shanghai — she learned there had been a rift between her relatives and her parents, which was described to Ms. Marks by relatives in France. It appears that a rift developed within her immediate family, too.
In his will, Charles Maier disinherited his children when he died nearly a decade later. Likewise, when Marie died in New York in 1975 — at which point she had been living in a less-than-reputable hotel — her two children went unmentioned.
Karl had admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey in 1955 under the name John William Henry Jaussaud (Karl Maier) and given a diagnosis of paranoid schizophrenia. He died in 1977 after spending his final years in a rest home.
To Ms. Marks, this information helps clarify why Maier may have been so secretive in her later years. “How many upper middle class families … want to hire a nanny with a violent alcoholic father, unstable mother and drug-addicted brother who had a record and lived in psychiatric institutions?” she writes.
And yet, perhaps Maier simply wasn’t one to mix life and work.
Ms. Marks is not the only person studying the life and history of Vivian Maier. Pamela Bannos, a professor at Northwestern University who teaches photography in the department of art theory and practice, has been working on Maier’s biography for about three years. Ms. Bannos, whose project is called “Vivian Maier’s Fractured Archive,” is also exploring the posthumous story of the work, which has many layers.
There is much more to be discovered about Maier’s past. As more details are revealed, the photography community will gain a better understanding of the perspective behind thousands and thousands of images.
The first part of this two-part series was published Tuesday. To see all of Ann Marks’s research on the family history of Vivian Maier, which was also shared in two parts, visit her website. Ms. Marks worked closely with Francoise Perron, who is from Maier’s family’s hometown in France. Work by Maier is showing at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles.
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