Ann: [00:03:00] Unofficially, what I was very interested in was the people in the documentary had very different descriptions of Vivian. Some said she was cold, that she was warm. You said. Some said she was dour, some said she was funny. And I couldn't figure out how one person could be all those things. And I felt they were very sincere in their descriptions of her. So that was kind of in the background of what I wanted to figure out all along. But the very first concrete step was that I when I contacted those that were involved in Vivian, they said the most important thing they needed to find out was what happened to Vivian's brother. They knew a brother existed from a census, but they knew nothing about him. And all public records stopped that related to him in 1942, which is when he was 22 years old. And it was really important because at that time the estate was being evaluated by Cook County, and it was the hottest issue of the time. And they needed to trace what happened to the brother. If he had airs, they would be the first in line for Vivian's estate. And so I said, okay, I bet I can find him. And I went about my research for a couple of months, and in fact I was able to trace his whole life. And then once I did that, I was kind of invited into the inner circle.

Craig: [00:04:30] You know, your book "Vivian Maier Developed", it's an extensive telling of Vivian's life story, but it's not just a telling of Vivian's story. All the questions we have about Vivian's psychology are kind of set up by, well, where did she come from? And that's questions regarding her family. And so the first part of your book, you really kind of set up the family tree in exactly where Vivian came from. And, you know, I think there are probably a few surprises there. I mean, can you tell us where you started there and how in the world you found what you found?

Ann: [00:05:09] You know, this is the focus, really, of my book and might not necessarily be for all biographies. But Vivian's behavior was so puzzling and there was so much secretiveness that I knew the story of the family history would be the key to unlocking her. And so the first thing I did, actually, was I used some public records. If you want to look at some someone, it's very easy to get like death, death records, like birth and date of death and where they're buried. So I did that for Vivian's ten relatives that had lived in the New York area. And it was very interesting, was very telling right from the start, because the ten relatives that I had gotten from census reports were buried in nine different places. And that's very unusual because most families have a cemetery and they're either together with the kin or, you know, maybe another cemetery if. They go with the maternal side. But to be that spread out, I knew there was some major troubled family history involved. So that kind of set the framework for me. Then what I did was try to trace the lives of each of those ten people and find out where they lived in New York. And Vivian actually spent 30 years of her life in New York, but we hadn't at that point found anybody in New York that had remembered her or being interviewed. And so what I did and this was the hardest part of the project by far, was I took Vivian's photographs.

Ann: [00:06:51] And by this point, Jeff and John, who owned the archives, both gave me their their full archives. So I had 140,000 photographs to look at. And for the first time, they could be put in chronological order, at least in my mind, because they were two different archives. And I would examine each photograph for clues of who the people were that were in them. So, for instance, very early on when Vivian arrived in New York and before she even bought her Rolleiflex cameras, so she was using her box camera that she had first used for a year in France. There were pictures of a family, an Italian family in a tenement brownstone. And for two different occasions, Vivian took photographs of them, like in a session on a rooftop. And there were three daughters and a mother and a father. And I could tell from it that. She knew them well. But by the way, there were a lot of pictures. It was her first photo session, so I could tell she was some kind of friend or acquaintance of them. But also it was basically her first photo session and that if I found these people, it would be very revealing. And usually Vivian left no notes at all. In this one case, there was a last name on the back of a photo. It was said either Randazzo or Rendazza. So I had a really good head start and I figured, Oh, you know, in a couple of weeks I'll find them.

Ann: [00:08:25] Well, it took me over a year because first of all, I had never heard this last name before, but there were something like five of them and randazzo's in the the New York area and very few in Manhattan in this. Interesting, I'm sorry, interestingly, but the ones that were didn't fit the bill like the people in the family. And so I ended up for some reason I thought they would be in Queens or something because in the background was a white apartment building. And I wasted all this time calling people in different boroughs and whatnot. And I even though there were backgrounds in the photographs, I just couldn't identify them. And then one day I was driving. I live in Manhattan down Third Avenue, and I saw a building and it looked exactly like the one in Vivian's photograph, but it was backwards, like the configuration, like the balconies were on the right instead of the way, that kind of thing. So I ran back home and I flipped to Vivian's photograph, and then it was all there, like the river was in the right place. The building, it was right near not only where I lived, but where Vivian lived, which I knew. And you could almost see Vivian's apartment in the background. And I spent like a year. So once I got that, then I was able to triangulate all the buildings and figure out the exact rooftop that the photos were taken.

Ann: [00:09:56] It no longer existed, but I could figure out from old map building was and I did go on old maps and there's a great historical site in New York where you can do that. And then I looked at different kinds of census reports, and it turns out that the Randazzo in the 1930 census didn't surface because it was spelled completely wrong. But the family lived there and it had three daughters and a mother and a father. And so then I knew the names of the people in the family, and I wanted to do my normal thing, which is to find look, I actually look at obituaries, and I found out that there was one still living sister. And I called and I went into Queens where she did live and met with her. And even, you know, she was in her eighties. She remembered everything about Vivian to a tee. And so I was able to learn so much about her, not only Vivian as a person, but about her early years of photography. So that's the kind of thing that I did. And in my book I have some of the back stories like the one I just described to you of some of the crazy things that I had to do to actually find people in New York. But in the end, I found almost everyone that knew her well in New York, and that made a huge difference in understanding her story.

Craig: [00:11:25] I think it struck me as I was reading the first third of the book just how hard it was to track down Vivian's family. Because, you know, when you're searching through these public records, it seemed like members of the family had intentionally been throwing out red herrings on government paperwork for years to cover up one thing or another. How do you track down someone when people are intentionally putting wrong information down?

Ann: [00:11:55] Well, this was the hardest thing of all because you go into this thinking, okay, they make a few mistakes on public records anyway. Every single public record you find as a mistake, I guarantee you. But of one sort or another. But you don't think someone's just going to make things up, right? So, for instance, the 1940 Census had Vivian's brother, her mother and her father and Vivian all living together on East 64th Street as a happy nuclear family. And it had the brother as younger rather than older than Vivian, which the 1930 census had him older. And that is why the brother was so hard to find, because there was an eight year difference in what his age could be. So here's this census in 1940, and it has this family, you know, living there. Meanwhile, the brother was long gone, wasn't even associated with the mother. The father was already remarried and living in Queens, and Vivian's mother just fabricated an entry of a happy nuclear family, you know, living in this apartment together. And in fact, they had never lived together, four of them. So they were always covering up reality to put forth some sort of fantasy version of themselves.

Ann: [00:13:18] And what I had to do, another example of that actually, is the grandmother was had Vivian's mother out of wedlock. And so she was from the very beginning covering up public records to make it seem like she was married. So she was making up husbands and changing ages and that kind of thing. But usually some true data on each record because they needed it for official purposes. And so I had to look at the totality of the records. Like I started to think something was wrong when the 1940 had the husband there. And then I found an entry in Queens that I knew had to be the husband because of the specific specificity of his job and things like that. And then I started to get suspicious. And then when I looked at all the records with that in mind that some things are covered up, I could get I could extract the real story, but it took me a long time to really realize what they were doing because you just would never go into it thinking that a family would do that.

Craig: [00:14:26] Well, one of the interesting relationships that you document in the book is her relationship with Emilie Haugmard. Can you talk about the special relationship that the two of them had?

Ann: [00:14:36] So Vivian's mother was pretty distant and removed. She was an unstable, irascible person. So a lot of times Vivian was left to interact with or be watched over by her grandmother's European friends, and her grandmother was a fantastic cook and worked for all the famous people in New York. And so she was earning money to support the whole family, and she wasn't available very often. So these European friends like Emilia Haugmard would watch over Vivian. So this woman lived in the apartment to Vivian's and in Vivian's early photos you can see them going to the beach. And Vivian was very relaxed with this woman. She was in her bathing suit, which later on she would never do. And you could see the affection that they had for one another. And in fact, when in the grandmother's will, she mentioned Emily as Vivian's sort of caretaker, not even Vivian's own mother. So, Vivian, you're going to see this in her photograph. She was very comfortable with older women, and you'll see older women portrayed very affectionately throughout Vivian's portfolio.

Craig: [00:15:56] I think one of the biggest parts of your research is trying to get to what made Vivian tick in, kind of what were the underlying quirks. Can you kind of tell us about interviews with the different families, how they portrayed Vivian in a different way?

Ann: [00:16:16] Yes. Aside from the first family that she worked with in Chicago and stayed for 11 years, the Gensburg family, who she became very close to and were really watching over her, you know, at the end of her life, most families found her very opinionated but distant and cold and unusual in how she dressed. And over time, she would cover up her body and wear, you know, very big coats and always had this kind of hiding. But I always call this, as, you know, hiding in plain sight because she was hiding and kind of showing off herself at the same time because she had such a distinctive look and character about her. And people really didn't understand her because of that. She would look strange and cold, but when she talked to you, she could be very warm and funny and and no one was able to kind of put it all together. You know, you had to really get deep into her psyche to understand that. And then starting when she was in Chicago, which was when she was 30 years old, she started collecting newspapers and she was a hoarder. And people with her kind of background are very often hoarders. And she kept piles and piles of newspaper, and it got worse and worse until her room would be so filled with it that she couldn't.

Ann: [00:17:43] There was no even where to sleep that it was on her bed and she would have to like sleep on the floor. And usually she locked a room and this was hidden from her. And eventually. Came out one way or the other. And you can imagine this woman is trusted with taking care of your children. Yet she's doing this bizarre behavior that at the time no one understood because there weren't stores or TV shows and things and they just didn't understand the syndrome of what she was doing. And she didn't acknowledge it really as any kind of quirk. She just sort of like, what's the big deal? I'm collecting newspapers. And so that was very off putting. It caused a lot of people to say, you know, this is enough, she's crazy or or I can't have her around my children yet. There's nothing she could do about it because this was part of her her illness, really, that she had to collect these newspapers. Because ultimately, if you had to put a nutshell, she collected possessions rather than people. She couldn't have relationships with people. So she had it with possessions and not valuable possessions. But for her newspapers, because they represented life and stories and excitement. And it's a very common thing for hoarders to collect.

Craig: [00:19:00] I have a son who's on the autism spectrum, and so I've done all this research over the years, and I've known people on the spectrum. And a lot of the descriptions that I hear people recount about their interactions with her make me think of somebody on the spectrum in terms of not picking up on social cues, facial expressions not matching a particular emotional state that somebody should or even how to react in certain situations. Like I know there's a story where a child had been hit by a car. Instead of providing help, she started taking photos.

Ann: [00:19:37] Yeah, exactly. Like with the empathy issue. So actually, at first, a lot of people thought that and she does display the characteristics of someone on the spectrum. And I consulted with quite a few psychiatrists about her condition because I had a lot of information, really, of her behavior and photographs of her like there was if you're going to examine someone posthumously, I had as much information as anybody could have. And the thought was she wasn't on the spectrum. And this is why when we have information and I interviewed people that knew her in France when she was a child, she lived in France in the village where the family came from, from age 6 to 12. And she showed no signs of being on the spectrum then. And she was outgoing and bossy and none of the things that you're describing. So the thought is that she she would have shown that at that time as a child and that and the symptoms that she displayed were consistent with the kind of disorder like schizoid disorder that someone would develop after a childhood of emotional deprivation. And and that's really what she experienced. And that was the manifestation of her childhood, which, you know, you could consider traumatic, really, because of the lack of protection and support that she got.

Craig: [00:21:06] And then I believe you also write in the book about how she would respond oddly to men, not necessarily boys, because she seemed to really love the Gensburg boys, but adult men she seemed to have an issue with.

Ann: [00:21:24] Well, she okay. So she clearly experienced some kind of violence, if not sexual abuse in her childhood. And she shows all the signs of that. She did have different circumstances where she would have been exposed to such a man in France when she was living there as a child. She they lived with her great aunt and the great aunt's paramour that also lived there with a drunk and violent man. So there's one circumstance, you know, another was Vivian's father was a violent man. So there's different periods of time when she had been probably exposed to this. And what she would do is if a man did a certain thing, she would have almost a trigger like speed reaction. So once a man, she was taking photographs and she was standing on like a log or tree stump and someone's backyard, and she thought she looked like she was going to topple. And so man just reached out and tried to help steady her by touching her elbow. And she turned around and she punched him in the nose. And literally there was a lawsuit like she really hurt him. And there's different examples like that. And in fact, every single person that she worked for in Chicago had. One story or another about this kind of reaction that she had. So it wasn't necessarily all men, but it was in certain situations. She was obviously having some kind of flashback from her childhood.

Craig: [00:23:06] It seems like, as you're telling the stories, going from one family to another, it seemed like the interview process in those days for for a nanny, for someone who's going to be living in your house and watching your kids wasn't as exhaustive as the interview process would be today. It seems like they were, maybe because she was so put together in French and had this persona that she could just reassure them that I've been doing this for a number of years and they're like, Sounds great. Or maybe they were just in a bad position. But it seemed like very rarely were. Were people even contacting previous employers of Vivian's?

Ann: [00:23:48] Yeah, the most it seemed like they did at that time. I mean, obviously there was no Internet to really check people out with kind of do references. But it was very interesting how it started in Chicago because she went and she met with Gainsbourg. And the story is that, you know, they talked for a while, they connected and Mrs. Ginsburg didn't even ask for a reference. And even though if she did ask Vivian, even though she had worked for ten different people, Vivian didn't give her reference because she'd rather not get the job than give away any information about her life so that people could trace her. So when she went to Chicago, it was if she started her and created her own back story. So she made people believe she was born in France. You know, she was lead people astray so that she could never be tracked.

Craig: [00:24:42] And so it seemed like the perfect profession for someone who didn't really want to put down roots.

Ann: [00:24:47] Yes. I don't think that she minded putting down roots in the right place. So, for instance, if the Gensburg family had kept her forever, I think she would have stayed forever. I mean, it's the only stable family, quote unquote, that she ever really had. But the boys grew up and they just didn't need a nanny anymore. But I don't think she wanted to leave. And then in subsequent situations, when she was happy, she didn't want to leave. You know, she was she she was looking for some stability, but it was more like it was a hassle to leave rather than that she minded moving. I mean sometimes there's a situation where she was tape recorded talking about different interviews she had and she was very upbeat about it and laughing about them. It wasn't like such a devastating situation for her to be let go because she was let go many, many, many times.

Craig: [00:25:43] Going back to these quirky interactions, I felt that it was really odd the story, she was actually on vacation with a family that she's working for, going across country on the West Coast and gets up one morning before dawn and shushes the children that she leaves out the door and they never see her again. Did I understand that right?

Ann: [00:26:07] Yes. This family, she's taken like something like 500 pictures of this family. So, so many. But there were no clues. And they took me years to find this family. And I wouldn't stop my research until I finally found them. I just had to find them. And finally I did. And there were so many great stories from this situation. But yes, she was going cross-country with the mother, the daughter and some cousins. They had a great trip. And Vivian, in the middle of the night made a little noise. The kids woke up because they were sharing an apartment I'm sorry, a hotel room with her. She shushed them back to sleep and she left and they never saw her again. And in fact, what was really interesting was. They never saw the picture she took of this vacation. So I was able to show them to him or I'm sorry, to the family so that they could see what their fantastic vacation look like because they never saw Vivian again. And she had taken all these pictures. So, of course, that was very exciting and stunning for them. But I was able to trace them, of course, because I have all the photos and I basically can trace most of the days of her life. But she was coming back to New York to work on her photography again, and she was starting to really get going by that point because she had a Rolleiflex camera. She when she was with this family, this was the family she worked for the longest in New York. And she really just wanted to get going and try some more professional photography from what I could tell.

Craig: [00:27:47] What do we think was standing in her way? I mean, at some point it seems like her fastidiousness about the prints or the developing may have stood in her way of producing certain postcards. But was it just the relationship building? Was it was too much going to be asked of her on an interpersonal level to to make that work? This whole notion of it's one thing to make the art, but it's another thing to kind of sell yourself as the artist.

Ann: [00:28:23] Yes. Well, I think in the short term, that was clearly an issue. You know, I like to tell this story where she started a business of making postcards when she started photography in France. And she had a whole pile of photographs from that time to make into postcards. And then she came to New York and continued that. And then she wrote a letter that we have to to Amedee Simon, who was her mentor and owner of the photography store in Saint Bonnet, where she lived and said, you know, I can't find a good printer here. I'd like to have a business arrangement with you where I send all my negatives from New York over to you. You print them and send them back to me. And like the fact that she couldn't find a printer in entire city of New York that was good enough for her and that she had to ship these negatives. You know, Transatlantic Link just shows you that she had no business acumen, you know, no sense of the cost benefit analysis. And clearly interactions, personal interactions would have been difficult. She wouldn't have been very good at compromising or selling her work, but I don't think that was really the issue. It was really an issue of her hoarding disorder coming to the surface. And that happens. It happens by the age of 30 typically, and that's the age she was when she went to Chicago and she couldn't let go of her photographs. She was hoarding them just like she was hoarding newspapers. It was not that she didn't want to share them. She couldn't because that was part of what she needed to survive. And the proof of that is this one family you mentioned in Los Angeles. They have over 100 vintage prints from Vivian that she gave them when no one in Chicago has that. The Ginzberg family may have had that, but she would never share her prints like that with people later in life because she was hanging on to them. And her behavior became progressively worse over time until she was just keeping everything.

Craig: [00:30:29] It sounds like it was it was really inconsistent because I believe you share a story about how the McMillan mother had asked for an extra print of of a photo of the daughter's in the bathtub. And that wound up being a huge blowup that kind of led to her leaving the family, right? I mean.

Ann: [00:30:49] Well, it actually isn't the reason she left because it was just the end of the school year. But it definitely created tension in the family. But again, that's right, before she went to Chicago. And to me, it was likely the first sign of her hanging on to her photos. All of a sudden she was becoming difficult and she didn't want to share them with other people.

Craig: [00:31:13] I believe you said in the book you quoted a number of almost eight tons of material that she was storing in in storage lockers around Chicago at the end. Is that right?

Ann: [00:31:26] Yes. And in fact, that's just in the the five storage lockers at the place that had the that she defaulted and had the auction. There were other storage lockers that the Ginsburg family knew of. In addition to that. Now, the reason there was so much stuff wait, wasn't because of photographic material was because of the newspapers. They weighed a lot.

Craig: [00:31:49] You know, it looks like she was putting clippings into photo albums, but were there just stacks and stacks of newspapers also? or was she kind of curating what she was holding on to?

Ann: [00:32:01] Well, it was both. She had in her mind, like her rationale was, oh, when I have time, I'm going to read these newspapers. That's why I'm keeping them. You know, there's things I have to look up and know. So she began to fill them into scrapbooks, like articles that were important to her and to what she was interested in, into scrapbooks, just like she did with some of her photographs. But she also kept all the rest of the newspapers, and she could never have kept up anyway with this scrapbook situation. And so she just kept them all in piles. So she was spending all her disposable income on these storage lockers to house old newspapers, essentially, and her photographic material. But she would have that into much smaller space.

Craig: [00:32:50] You know, at the point that Maloof and Goldstein acquire these materials through, you know, a storage default auction system of whatever kind. She's still alive, right? Do we know...

Ann: [00:33:04] It was the end of her life? It was about...she was alive for about a year and a half, I think.

Craig: [00:33:11] Do we know whether she was actually aware of enough that she had lost this material? And, you know.

Ann: [00:33:19] I believe she had no idea at all. I mean, at that time, no one knew her. There was nothing on the Internet where John and Jeff or other people that there were about ten people that bought different parts of her archive at the time. No one could really find her. There wasn't information at that point to get in touch with any figure who she knew and find her. But also she. The reason I believe she defaulted on her storage locker was that she didn't realize she defaulted on it. So she had actually been renting the lockers at this particular place for 25 years, and she knew she had to pay a certain amount every year, but she was always late in doing it. So it's not like she she didn't know that she would have to pay for this. But in the past, they let her go and, you know, things would work out and it wasn't a big deal. But at that point in time, the storage locker company was sold to someone else and they got the papers in order and sent default notices to say, if you don't pay, we're going to auction off your stuff. Well, we don't even know for sure if they had Vivian's current address at the time, but it doesn't even matter. She got default notices all the time and just ignored them like she never thought anything would happen and I don't even think she thought about it. It wasn't like people were under the impression that she was visiting her storage lockers and looking at her precious photos, and it was such important material to her. She never she hardly ever is reported to having visited her storage lockers except to get one thing or put something in. So it wasn't like that at all. So she she probably didn't even know anything was happening and didn't even think about it.

Craig: [00:35:05] You entered this story, having watched the documentary. Since then, you've probably looked at all 140,000 photos and done years of research on her and her family and the people she interacted with. How has your perception of Vivian changed from that first introduction to her to the fuller picture that you have over today?

Ann: [00:35:32] Well, that's a good question. I think that at least for me and why I'm sort of doing this for other people is that my goal was really to understand the artists so we could better understand her work. And now that we understand her life story, we can look at her work and understand so much more about why she took what kinds of pictures and how she went about it and what her priorities were and why something caught her eye. And you can see, for instance, that there's so many pictures of children and older women, and those are the people that she was most comfortable with. And you can see she had a great eye for style. But if you look at her, people thought, oh, she was wearing like Army, Salvation Army clothes. But I was able to look at all her clothes that John Maloof has, and they were all designer labels. She wore really fancy clothes and tailored clothes and liberty of loving liberty of London blouses. So now you can understand her sense of style and quality and on and on and on. And so I think it helps us to really understand her wonderful portfolio and nothing more than her self-portraits, because one of the most interesting things I found was I sent her self-portraits sort of chronologically and not.

Ann: [00:36:55] Perfectly, but mostly they really reflect what she was going through in her life. And while we started the project, I think Jeff and John had found like 200 self-portraits and by the end I had found 585 in the archive. And when you put them all together, you can see that in New York. She was presenting herself as a young professional photographer, and she almost never did that. After she was in New York and in Chicago, in the beginning, she was presenting herself as a happy nanny, but she was. And then when she left the Ginsburg's, even though they didn't know it, she was very upset and depressed inside. And you can see that her self-portraits are very bleak and shadowy. So that in and of itself helps you really understand her work and and understand that her self-portraits were clearly a means of establishing a present presence and exploring her identity and expressing feelings over time. And that that was what the role of photography played in her life. So it opens up completely new learning about Vivian.

Craig: [00:38:06] Well, the the book is "Vivian Maier Developed" and is it available now?

Ann: [00:38:11] And yes, I think it's still on Amazon. It's been sold out in bookstores for a few months. And they can't get another print run, I don't think, until July. So there's some around. But the best place probably to get it at this point is online.

Craig: [00:38:30] Well, that's good news for you that that it sounds very popular. And so. 

Ann: [00:38:35] I hope so.

Craig: [00:38:36] You know, the probably the last question I have is, what do you think it is that does captivate people so much about Vivian? Is it just this this sense of mystery? And even after all this research, do you think there's still mystery there surrounding who who she really was?

Ann: [00:38:55] I mean, yes, there's always going to be some kind of mystery. I, I can't completely unlock her. I'm sure even after I wrote the book, I found some new things out which were interesting. But, you know, when she first was discovered worldwide, no one knew that there was a mystery. Her pictures just flew across the Web, and it was because of the quality of the work itself. And in my view, it's because she really understands, understood the human condition and her photographs really displayed something that everyone could relate to. You know, you could feel they were emotional and beautiful, but you could relate to them in your own life. And I think that's really what she offers us in an extraordinary way.

Craig: [00:39:47] Well, Ann I really appreciate your time today, and I really respect the obvious amounts of hard work that it took for you to put this book together. And I appreciate you coming on to talk about Vivian Maier and I encourage people to go check out your book "Vivian Maier Developed" Thanks for your time, Ann.. 

Ann: [00:40:07] Okay. It's my pleasure. It was great talking.

Craig: [00:40:16] That's all the time we have for this week. You've been listening to Art Sense you can find the show on Apple Podcasts, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher Radio, Spotify or your favorite podcast app. If you've enjoyed this podcast, be sure to subscribe. And while you're there, please rate the show and leave a quick review. Your feedback is the key to other folks finding us. And if you'd like to see images related to the conversation, read the transcript and find other bonus features. You can go to Canvia.art and click on the podcast tab. If you'd like to reach out to me. You can email me at craig@canvia.art. Thanks for listening.