Selfies – A modern phenomenon?

Photography is a way of feeling, of touching, of loving. What you have caught on film is captured forever... it remembers little things, long after you have forgotten everything.

Aaron Siskind

As we pass through the Christmas period many of us will have received new phones and subsequently those phones will have been used to produce the extemporaneous selfie which will have no doubt ended up on our Facebook page, Instagram or twitter feed.

In an article by Alexandra E. Petri published in National Geographic earlier this year, she writes about the power of original selfies produced by some of the most prolific women artists of all time, for me one of those women jumped off the page and into my heart.

Selfies have taken over social media newsfeeds, filling screens with snapshots of people striking perfect poses in sublime settings, laughing with friends, or caught in quiet moments alone. These images appear inescapable, and in today’s social media-driven ecosystem, they’re often seen as self-indulgent or fuelled by a need for affirmation and acceptance. But a deeper look at the practice shows the potential for an honest portrayal of one’s truest self—one that can make strong social statements, claim spaces, and communicate messages bigger and broader than the people bold enough to turn the lens on themselves.

Self-portraiture isn’t a by-product of the smart phone. Since as early as the 15th century, women artists across different mediums used self-portraits as a way to meditate on the world around them and their places within it. More than just capturing physical features, self-portraits allow artists to channel their beliefs into their work in ways that are revealing and revolutionary, ultimately memorialising the woman and her story. Their art is both deeply personal and broadly relatable, giving readers an intimate look at a particular place and time and providing a platform to find common ground.

In many ways, one woman did more than just create art: she helped give way to a generation of voices around the world.

Vivian Maier

An American street photographer born in New York City, Vivian Maier is considered to be one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century. Her craft was her life, though she supported herself by working as a nanny for families in New York and then Chicago. Despite her artistic legacy and narrative influence on picture making, little is known about Maier.

Many details of Maier's life remain unknown. She was born in New York City in 1926, the daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier. Several times during her childhood she moved between the U.S. and France, living with her mother in the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near her mother's relatives.

When Maier was 4, she and her mother moved to the Bronx with Jeanne Bertrand, who at the time was a professional photographer. Shortly after she moved back to France with her mother where she spent the majority of her childhood. In 1951, aged 25, Maier moved from France to New York, where she worked in a sweatshop. She moved to the North Shore area of Chicago in 1956, where she worked primarily as a nanny and carer for the next 40 years.

One of her employers, Lane Gensburg, later said of Maier, “She was like a real, live Mary Poppins, she never talked down to the kids and was determined to show them the world outside their own affluent suburb.”

In 1959 and 1960, Maier took a trip around the world on her own, photographing Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy.

In 2007, two years before she died, Maier failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago's North Side. As a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8 mm film were auctioned. Three photo collectors bought parts of her work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow. Maier's photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008 by Slattery, but the work received little response.

Maloof had bought the largest part of Maier's work, about 30,000 negatives, because he was working on a book about the history of the Chicago neighbourhood of Portage Park. Maloof discovered Maier's name in his boxes but was unable to discover anything about her until a Google search led him to Maier's death notice in the Chicago Tribune in April 2009. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier's photographs on Flickr, and the results went "viral", with thousands of people expressing interest.

Maloof went on to describe Maier as; “A Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person." She learned English by going to theatres, which she loved ... She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone.

Since her posthumous discovery, Maier's photographs, and their discovery, have received international attention in mainstream media and her work has appeared in gallery exhibitions, several books, and documentary films.

Photography critic Allan Sekula has suggested that the fact that Maier spent much of her early life in France sharpened her visual appreciation of American cities and society. Sekula compared her work with the photography of Swiss-born Robert Frank; “I find myself imagining her as a female Robert Frank, without a Guggenheim grant, unknown and working as a nanny to get by. I also think she showed the world of women and children in a way that is pretty much unprecedented.”

Photographer Mary Ellen Mark has compared her work to that of Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus. Joel Meyerowitz, also a street photographer, has said that Maier's work was “suffused with the kind of human understanding, warmth and playfulness that proves she was a real shooter!”

Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, has drawn attention to how Maier's photographs are reminiscent of many famous 20th-century photographers, and yet have an aesthetic of their own. She writes that Maier's work; “may add to the history of 20th-century street photography by summing it up with an almost encyclopaedic thoroughness, veering close to just about every well-known photographer you can think of, including Weegee, Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, and then sliding off in another direction. Yet they maintain a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion.”