Studying the self

Unlike selfies, self-portraits are celebrated as works of art and are rarely mentioned in the same breath, even though both stem from the same basic human impulse

Back in the 1950s and 1960s, when the world was black and white, a reclusive nanny walked the streets of New York and Chicago. There was nothing unusual about her, except that she always carried a camera, a Rolleiflex, with her. A keen observer of the world, she would consistently capture its transient moments on film.

It was a hobby she pursued during her outings with the children in her charge. At times, she would take off on longer excursions, travelling around the world, camera in hand: India, the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Singapore, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Turkey, Greece, Lebanon, Italy, Switzerland, France, Los Angeles. Though she created a humongous body of work, she never exhibited it and seldom showed it to anyone. It remained a private passion. Turns out, she rarely even developed the negatives.

The nanny, Vivian Maier, who died on April 21, 2009 aged 83, today has a kind of cult following for her black-and-white street photography, her enigmatic life adding to her legend. The Fotografiska museum in New York has put up a major exhibition of her photographs, “Vivian Maier: Unseen Work”. It is the first retrospective of such scale in the United States and is on until September 29. There is also an Oscar-nominated documentary,  Finding Vivian Maier (2014), besides other documentaries, that tries to piece together her mysterious life.

Recognition came posthumously after a real-estate agent, a history buff, found her photographs in a locker she had rented but had stopped paying for. Astonished by this unexpected discovery, he then scouted for more of her work, and ended up with over 130,000 negatives, prints and slides, which have since been exhibited in several countries.

Through her photographs, one can almost picture her at work, like a fly on the wall, clicking away unnoticed. Sometimes, though, the subjects of her interest caught her framing them. Some of them smiled, some frowned, a few looked back inquisitively or surprised. On rare occasions, some even became willing participants and posed for her. Curiously, the photographer who chose to stay away from the flashlight also filmed herself in the world she focused her lens on. There is a whole series of self-portraits, always taken in a manner to create a dramatic effect. In some, she is a hazy reflection in a shop or café window, caught between the scene inside and the world outside. In one, she is seen smiling uncharacteristically into a looking glass that a workman is carrying in a street.

There are also several photographs with fragmented images of her captured in a single frame. For example, in one, her face is reflected in one mirror, while her hands that hold the camera are visible in another. It’s as though she is trying to put bits of her life together or attempting to grasp its multiple realities. Sometimes she is simply a shadow on a pavement or on the wall of a tall building.  These self-studies are among Maier’s most fascinating works. They speak of an observer observing herself, and even revealing herself so that those who may one day see her photographs would see not just the world as she saw it but also her in it. Perhaps that was the idea. Or perhaps it wasn’t all that profound. Perhaps it was simply a woman with a camera taking unusual, but very creative, pictures of herself the way we all do today, turning the gaze on the self through selfies.

Why, though, do we indulge in selfies? Why, for that matter, do artists create self-portraits? Capturing the self has for centuries been a human occupation, with the world’s first self-portrait believed to have been painted as far back as 1433: “Portrait of a Man” by Netherlandish artist Jan van Eyck. Better quality mirrors and their easy accessibility only furthered this art of self-depiction. Vincent van Gogh, Amrita Sher-Gil, Frida Kahlo, and many others, have all been the subjects of their art — Kahlo arguably the most. With 55 of her 143 paintings being self-portraits, it’s no wonder that Kahlo is known as the master of self-portraits.

Unlike the selfie, though, self-portraits are celebrated as works of art, and the two are rarely spoken of in the same breath? An interesting study by German psychologist Claus-Christian Carbon, however, ventures into this tricky territory and asks: “Is the typical selfie-photographer’s intuition-based spontaneity really so different from the artist’s well-planned behaviour?” He places the contemporary selfie, a mass phenomenon scorned upon as narcissistic, in historic context. Studying self-portraits over more than five centuries, back to the Renaissance, he draws parallels to establish that selfies “aim to provide similar messages and show similar types of expression as self-portraits from the domain of artistic painting”. And that it all boils down to  Conditio humana — the human condition.