A Legal Battle Over Vivian Maier’s Work
All photos above are copyright by Vivian Maier.
The following text is the lead paragraph from a New York Times article on September 5, 2014
The story of the street photographer Vivian Maier has always been tangled — she worked much of her life as a nanny, keeping her artistic life a secret, and only after she died in 2009, at the age of 83, nearly penniless and with no family, were her pictures declared to be among the most remarkable of the 20th century. Now a court case in Chicago seeking to name a previously unknown heir is threatening to tie her legacy in knots and could prevent her work from being seen again for years.
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By Jim McKinniss
It would have been nice if the writer had delved deeper into Mr. Deal’s motivation for his intrusive interest in pursuing legal action to undo and unravel all of the work that Mr. Maloof has done in promoting the work and the artistic genius of Vivian Maier. The documentary seems to make clear how pure Mr. Maloof’s intentions were and the degree of obsession with which he pursued his efforts to share his discovery of Vivian Maier with the world. He clearly comes across as someone passionate about the beauty and brilliance of her art and he took great care and great pains to ensure he promoted her art and legacy correctly and with all due diligence. On the other hand, Mr. Deal’s motives and interest in Vivian Maier are far less clear and much more suspect. As presented in the article, he comes off as an artistic ambulance chaser. It would be interesting to know, as Paul Harvey used to say, “the rest of the story.”