Vivian Girl

The posthumous discovery of a trove of photographs by Vivian Maier speaks volumes about the importance of maintaining archives.

Maier was self-effacing and modest about her abilities as a photographer. Celebrity was of less importance during her lifetime, and perhaps suppressed by the fact that the medium was still analog, and was not influenced by the Internet celebrity mill.

She was essentially a street photographer in the Cartier-Bresson tradition, although the full scope of her artistic process is unknown. (Another reason for artists to keep journals and diaries). She was quite organized, and it looks as thought she did consider what would happen to her work upon her death, placed in such a way to be discovered and uncovered like ancient gold jewelry.

In some ways she was like a Henry Darger without the creepiness, but there might be a hint of an OCD, with so many undeveloped rolls of film. (It's odd that she was disengaged with them to the point of not wanting to look at them. Perhaps she was ashamed at what she would find on them, and afraid she would have to destroy what she would see.)

Photography in particular is a fecund medium, as it is easy to take thousands of exposures. Making photographs is a somewhat different activity because it extends beyond taking the snapshot. Making photographs takes extra time to think about composition, framing, context, titling, captioning, cataloging, and so on. Maier did some of this which is partly the reason we see her work now.

The good thing about film and prints is that they are immediately accessible, they display themselves without electricity or a computer, and people are agog when they find them 50 years later. Prints are more respectable. CDs are just nasty things (as the late Malcolm McLaren used to bemoan).

But now that there is a surfeit of digital photography in cyberspace, it still remains as obscure as negatives and prints filed in shoe boxes, or (gasp) plastic CVS bags wrapped with dry-rotted rubber bands. They just reside on CDs, DVDs and hard drives (some of the older ones no longer readable) and Flickr accounts with zero image views.

Art gains importance via tangibility and accessibility. Digital art is not tangible but more accessible.

After an image is floated off into cyberspace via Facebook, etc. it typically sits on a server and then hard drives, if people download them, producing many iterations, that in itself makes a quasi archive. Anonymous images languish until they become important, as the images of Vivian Maier have, through the hard work of Maloof Foundation.

How may photos and videos do we have that are as good as Vivian Maier's? What are we doing to properly curate and archive our work? For the deceased what are we doing to honor the work of our loved ones? Or are we just being too precious?: E-bay is chock full of anonymous old snapshots posted by people too afraid to dump them.

Digital archiving is an import task that we have not even begun to tackle. Few people even want to think of doing it. But more people are in fact doing it and finding and archiving some really good material.