A sympathetic portrait of an artist who remains elusive.
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 contents—hundreds of boxes—at auction. The boxes contained material from decades of hoarding: books, magazines, newspapers, and, most astonishingly, photographs—albums, 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.Pub Date: Oct. 6, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-226-47075-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Univ. of Chicago
Review Posted Online: July 16, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2017
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered...
The incredible true story of three Jewish women who survived the Holocaust.
Priska, Rachel, and Anka were married Jewish women in their early 20s when the Nazis took control of Europe. Like millions of other Jews, they were forced to give up their normal lives, all of their belongings, and their homes. Shuttled into ghettos and then off to one of the most notorious camps, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, they suffered through the Nazis’ increasing atrocities. But these three women all held a secret: they were pregnant. They were moved from Auschwitz and ended up in Mauthausen, another notorious death camp. With facing the most horrible conditions imaginable, all three gave birth right before the Allies accepted Germany’s surrender. In this meticulously detailed account, Holden (Haatchi & Little B: The Inspiring True Story of One Boy and His Dog, 2014, etc.) compiles an enormous amount of information from interviews, letters, historical records, and personal visits to the sites where this story unfolded. The graphic history places readers in the moment and provides a sense of the enduring power of love that Priska, Rachel, and Anka had for their unborn children and for the husbands they so desperately hoped to see after the war. Even though it occurred more than 70 years ago, the story’s truth is so chillingly portrayed that it seems as if it could have happened recently. These three women and their infants survived in the face of death, and, Holden writes, “their babies went on to have babies of their own and create a second and then a third generation, all of whom continue to live their lives in defiance of Hitler’s plan to erase them from history and from memory.”
An engrossing, intense, and highly descriptive narrative chronicling the ghastly conditions three pregnant women suffered through at the hands of the Nazis.Pub Date: May 5, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-237025-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 28, 2015
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