Ninth International Conference on The Image

Abstract

The investigation of Vivian Maier’s photographs is an encounter with what she had come to see and had selected as a subject for her art. Over a time span of 30 years, Vivian Maier continuously portrayed herself reflected in surfaces and glass windows, “the world fragmented as seen through frames, doorways, and boxes, her shadows projected into others’ lives, onto sidewalks, and the back of strangers” (Avedon 2013: 8). Very often she portrayed herself with other women appearing within one frame – standing next to her, capturing her gaze, posing in their petticodes – forming a harsh contrast to the woman, which according to one of her former charges, Duffy Levant, looked like a “woman factory worker of the Soviet Union in the 50s” (Maloof & Siskel 2013). The constant appearance of women in Maier’s self-portraits reveal that Maier seemed to visually position herself to post-war gender roles and deconstructed them by using herself as a medium of comparison and contrast. The following paper presentation is going to have a close look on the special aesthetics of a selected part of her photographic self-portraits (N= 100) applying Ralf Bohnsack’s (2011) image analysis procedure combing it with Pilarczyk’s and Mietzner’s (2003) serial-iconographic analysis method. In this paper presentation, results of the analysis will be discussed and in a second step connected to gender roles, the socio-cultural background and Zeitgeist of post-war America.