Looking Again

Vivian Maier captures herself in the reflection of a window with trees in the background, likely in the Chicago suburbs, c. 1965. A garage or shed is just visible beyond the reflection.

FRANCES DORENBAUM To collect objects means to care for them. In this conversation, Vivian Maier: In Color curator Frances Dorenbaum talked about art collecting and caretaking with Jeffrey Goldstein, who recently donated a portion of his Vivian Maier images to the Museum. Many of these color images are on display in the exhibition.

People collect for all sorts of reasons: the excitement of chancing upon a piece that resonates with something in the unconscious, to meet others who share a passion for objects, to display art or other items in one ’ s home, to donate and contribute to a larger cultural history, or as an investment—just to name a few. Whether the intention of collecting is practical or intuitive, collecting involves a sense of care.

The idea of care encompasses many different considerations, beginning with the selection process of acquiring an item. As the new caretaker of an object, one must then think about its condition: Does it need repairing? How can it be stored safely? Accessibility is another factor one might consider when purchasing something rare: What does it mean to bring an item into one ’ s private care versus sharing it with a larger audience? And if the item is to be shown to others, the caretaker must consider what context the object is presented in and how its history is treated. Objects accrue a life and story of their own as they pass through different hands and times, and these chapters weigh in on one ’ s

understanding of an object.

Jeffrey Goldstein is a collector and custodian of art objects, who gifted 1,804 color slides and transparencies made by Vivian Maier to the Chicago History Museum in 2020. He has one of the three largest independent collections of Maier ’ s work and, along with his team, who help with tasks from archiving to printing, has championed Maier ’ s photography over the last decade.

The images in his gift to the Museum are colorful depictions of life in Chicago and its suburbs from around 1954 to 1974. The developed film was donated with the envelopes from the print labs, which reveal the pictured locations and date the rolls. Goldstein and his team attempted to organize the material chronologically so they could better understand Maier ’ s trajectory.

These images have already had several caretakers, beginning with Maier, then moving through storage lockers, an auctioneer ’ s hands, and various buyers, eventually making their way to Goldstein and now this Chicago institution. It seems fitting to reflect on the journey of this collection and the care surrounding the unique posthumous life of this body of work. Goldstein joined me on Zoom in September 2021 to speak about his evolving relationship with Maier ’ s work, the complexity of determining how to best support her photographs and legacy, and letting go of this set of images.

Frances Dorenbaum: I want to start off by talking about your thoughts on the exhibition. I think our audience would be excited to hear some of your insights.

Jeffrey Goldstein: It’ s always exciting to see a curator ’ s vision that further expands the way we view things. This curation adds another layer of insight and appreciation to Maier ’ s work. I liked the presentation of viewing the work from different angles and perspectives. It engages the viewer as if they themselves were inside the camera. Your curation has the feel of taking a long walk all the while quizzically craning and bending and looking. Walking through the exhibition is a reflection of the walks the photographer herself took.

Kodak processing envelopes, flyer, and special customer service note belonging to Maier, 1971. The flap is stamped with the date July 19, 1971, and a note reads: Print Regardless. The order was placed at Lyman-Sargent, Inc. 751 at 1138 Central Avenue in Wilmette, Illinois.

FD: I appreciate that. You have been a caretaker of Maier

’ s work so much longer than my role in her story, so it was nice to have your trust when preparing the exhibition.

JG: The nature of the project’ s successes comes from it being very collaborative from the start. Everybody contributing has a field of expertise, and all those life experiences create a life of its own. The nice thing is, to have that, the project has to keep growing, and in order to do that it has to have new people come in, and they have to be able to have the space to add their own perspective. Nobody else has ever brought her work together as you have, with these different points of viewing. I think there is profundity in the basics, and we forget those details, like how we view things. Like in her portraiture, Maier does this inadvertently with the Rolleiflex, where she catches the bottom of someone ’ s chin, which makes them bigger than life, because what it does is shrink you—the viewer—down, so those points of perspective are really quite fascinating. FD: This project was interesting for me because I was online working remotely the whole time, which is something I have never done before.

JG: That’ s hard.

FD: It was so strange, Jeff. As you know, the prints in this exhibition were made for this occasion. Printing was a challenging step to encounter and think through with our team, particularly from afar, because I have never had the responsibility of determining how an artist would print their work. Dealing with color and then color correction added a whole other level. So, I was curious to hear what you thought it was like to see the images printed, how you thought they might have transformed. And, did you print any of these color images in the past and go through your own experience of trying to interpret them?

JG: You had a much more difficult project than we had, because we stuck with black and white. With the black

and white, we only used the technology that would have been available when the film was shot, so that’ s why it’ s darkroom silver gelatins, hand-spotted.

We never printed any color. That’ s because the technology available now to print color is digital. Color is all over the board, especially with today ’ s printers and digital files and what can be done. The prints in the exhibition look great. They had a sense of authenticity of the color matching the subject matter.

FD: Yes, we wanted to match the images with natural light as much as possible without changing other details. I, along with the team, collected as much information as possible from people like you, who are close to Maier ’ s work, about their printing choices, and conservators or others who have dealt with color correction, so we could figure out the most ethical and minimally intrusive way of interpreting the work. There weren ’t clear-cut standards for a project of this nature.

Was uniformity ever important, because the different caretakers of Maier ’ s work collaborate with different printers, so everyone has their own interpretation and set of technical specifications to use? Is that something you all discussed or were those decisions made independently based on your parts of the collection? JG: They were based independently on what we adopted as our personal missions. John [Maloof], another caretaker, made works with Howard Greenberg, so he ’ s New York. Steve Rifkin, the printer they work with, will print as a New York printer, and so his prints side by side to Ron [Gordon] and Sandy [Steinbrecher]’ s have a different feel in look and tonal range to them. It’ s a regional sensibility. What was so good about the printers I work with, Ron and Sandy, is that they are Chicago blue-collar workers, and Ron was in essence printing in the same era as Maier. So, without realizing it, you end up with Chicago printers that make Chicago sensibility–type of prints with a no frills, blue-collar approach. Inevitably that adds to the interest.

FD: How did you get interested in photography and collecting? You mentioned a mission, but do you have a general philosophy on collecting?

JG: Well, it’ s a personal passion. I was born in Florida, and as a kid, I loved to collect seashells and things along the edge of the water. That’ s probably where my collecting sensibilities started. I had dreams for years about being at the ocean and water rolling back out and all these beautiful seashells and things there. And then we

Eight cameras in their boxes on a table with a basket of artificial flowers, location unknown, c. 1974.

(Above) Pigeons fly by the Prudential Building (now One Prudential Plaza) at 130 East Randolph Street, Chicago, c. 1974. (Below) Children ice skate on a makeshift outdoor rink, location unknown, c. 1965.

moved to Las Vegas, and we used to go out into the desert and go fossil hunting, and many of the fossils we found were shells, so I was still collecting shells, but ones that were millions of years old. That perspective creates an interest in the history of what you are collecting, how things fit together, passages of time.

Then, when I was in school, the first piece of art I bought was a Jim Nutt etching. It was on a student’ s budget, and it was really expensive at the time—$200, right from the gallery. I remember bringing it back and showing my printmaking teacher, since I was a printmaker, and he hated it—the paper, the image. He was a traditional printmaker, but his reaction almost made me love it even more, even though I had a lot of love and respect for him. So I started collecting works on paper.

You put a story together when you collect—it’ s an enhancement of my life while I’ m in Chicago, passionate about this group of people I meet or work with, and I have parts of them and their work hanging on my wall that I get to live with every day.

People collect for all sorts of reasons. For me it’ s a life enhancement, but there ’ s also a thing where you try to pull together some consistency in what you are collecting. It’ s almost like collecting shards of a pot. You never have all the pieces, but that’ s part of the fun of it. You ’ re always still looking for more to add, it’ s never completely formed, but it’ s all these pieces that interlock and fit together. It’ s a great way for me to learn about things by going through that process.

When you buy an original piece of artwork, in a way, you ’ re also buying the performance and the time the artist spent making that piece, so there was an activity and now you have that, so you are conserving a little slice of the artist and their work. In some ways, Maier ’ s vintage prints are more dear to me, because those were Vivian Maier ’ s work. Even though they are diminutive, they tell her story as clearly as possible—the time, her circumstances, her decision-making—they ’ re her DNA.

FD: You are in a unique position as one of the major collectors of Maier ’ s work because you got her work a little while after the initial auctions. Did you know about her work before you owned any? How did that come about? Maybe there were murmurs already?

JG: It was rumors. Ron Slattery, another caretaker of Maier ’ s work, actually got me started with fifty-seven vintage prints. I knew Ron for a number of years from the Allstate Arena ’ s [Wolff’ s] Flea Market. It was only a rumor, and I’ ve been in the arts long enough, everyone sort of wishes for something like this, but it never materializes.

FD: It’ s kind of chance that you got into this then?

A golden maple leaf caught in the chrome fender of a white car, location unknown, c. 1974.

JG: Oh, absolutely! So that kind of got me getting more into her. Then I had an opportunity to make purchases from one of the original buyers. I was lucky to come in. There were great chances I took a couple times, because she easily could have been a flash in the pan . . . I was not quite sure what I was going to do with her work.

FD: At what point in the collecting process did you start to reach out to others to begin the collaborative effort of sorting through this chunk of work? And how did you find your team?

JG: It started with Anne Zakaras. She was working for an appraisal company that I had contacted to do some appraisal work. Anne ended up leaving that company and staying with me. She has really great skills related to the arts. She and I spent a year just archiving, which is tedious, difficult, time consuming, and there is no monetary reward in doing that, but I felt there was nothing we could do until we had a better understanding of the material.

FD: Would you explain a little bit about how you archive? What did that mean for you and what was the process of doing that?

JG: The material came pell-mell. All this material was in four storage lockers. All the paperwork apparently had been thrown away because RPN Sales & Auction House, run by Roger Gunderson, purchased the four lockers, and paperwork doesn ’t sell. The remainder was removed, shuffled around, and the negatives were separated. You have to envision boxes and boxes of loose material, so the first step is trying to put things together physically by date, which is maybe written on the glassine sleeve, but maybe not, so you have to match it. It’ s like forensics: you have a messy murder scene, and you have to somehow piece this whole story back together. This

A collection of cheap novels in a cardboard box, location unknown, c. 1974.

material had gone through so many hands and had been moved from Chicago to Indiana—packaged, repackaged, moved. To go back to the analogy of a pot and shards, it’ s like the shards are broken up and separated in boxes with other shards, and you have to put together as much of it as you can using small pieces of information.

The vintage photographs may have a stamp number from the developer, so you find all the photographs that are spread all over the place that match that format and have that number, and then you can put together a roll. At that point, then, you can start scanning and archiving and coming up with a digital list of things that have some type of chronological flow to them or may have the inclusion of topics.

FD: It sounds like this step was using just the material you had in front of you before you conducted any research.

JG: Right. Before any exhibitions.

FD: Since this was not something you had been anticipating, you weren ’t originally searching for her work, was it nerve-racking to quickly become one of the key caretakers of her work?

JG: It was nerve-racking because it was something bigger than us. It wasn ’t something we created. It was something we had to chase and stay up with. We would be getting requests, and I rarely ever turned anybody down.

FD: I think that’ s the right attitude, but it’ s a lot of work.

JG: It did create full-blown insomnia, which I embraced, because it gave me more hours.

The core team, and I cannot speak well enough about them—Anne, Sandy, Ron, and myself—we were all equals. Everybody contributed something that was essentially priceless. We felt we were in a privileged position because we had something to share. FD: Even if your intention was to let the work take the front position, you are the speakers and the infrastructure of building the legacy. I personally felt a lot of weight trying to think about what might Maier be okay with, how to not impose myself too much onto her story, how to respect her life and privacy in a way by not focusing on her biography, but instead on her work and vision, and by trying to respect and understand that many other people already spent so much time with her work that I was bringing something new, but maybe didn ’t know as much about it. I had to balance a lot of people ’ s different ways of caring for this story and work.

It’ s tricky because I work with a lot of contemporary artists, so we can meet and speak with each other, get to know each other and build that relationship before we start delving into a project. I can only imagine, realizing the mass of what you were taking on as it was happening, that you must have thought about or asked about this issue of ethics and responsibility.

JG: There should be a questioning process about this. Why are you printing this size? Why are you printing in this method? Especially in this day and age. And a big part of that had to do with who we were. In our team we had people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, and 60s, so as far as the decision-making process, we had a nice range of ages.

Of course, I had plenty of time to think about these things. As far as an artist has a responsibility throughout their life of editing their work, and ultimately doing something with their work—everyone who makes art and has a body of work knows if you don ’t do something, it’ s at the whims and mercies of whatever takes place when you ’ re gone. Vivian Maier greatly cared for this work. She moved it multiple times. There ’ s considerable cost in storage and it was stored well, even though out of her hands things got mixed up. But for decades this material was well-stored, so the question gets to be does one have the right to make prints and share?

Shadows cast by the inner harp and frame onto the lamp shade, location unknown, c. 1974.

(Above) The east façade of the Chicago Cultural Center, formerly the Chicago Public Library, at 78 East Washington Street, c. 1964. (Below) The Everett McKinley Dirksen US Courthouse at 219 South Dearborn Street during construction, as seen looking west from State Street c. 1964.

An elderly man in a plaid shirt, gray jacket, and fedora, likely in Highland Park, Illinois, c. 1965.

Portrait of an unidentified woman wearing a pink wool coat, likely in the Chicago suburbs, c. 1960.

Has this served a bigger and better good by being exposed than if it was never exposed? And hands down, this brought so many more people into an art fold. It was inspirational, especially for younger people who we communicated with a lot.

For example, one of the last projects I did was with a renowned high school marching band in South Dakota, who wanted to celebrate Vivian Maier and the theme of acceptance. A lot of these projects don ’t have the funding, so in this case we paid for banners and images for them. I think one of the bigger things that came out of this effort was you can ’t really judge the person alongside of you without really knowing them.

It would be pretty hard to argue that this wasn ’t a really giving artist and a really giving project. We sold prints, which we had to do to make money to make exhibitions. These sales allowed people to go and see exhibitions at no cost to them. They were basically paid for by the collectors. The collectors were the grease on the tracks that allowed us to do the shows. being sensitive with storytelling; etc. How did the concept of care play into your relationship to Maier ’ s work?

JG: It’ s really enormous because, ultimately, I don ’t feel anybody, especially when it comes to art, owns anything. We are nothing but the caretaker, so you picked the perfect word for that. Your job if you ’ re a responsible, caring collector is to care for it. It’ s kind of a pain at times, since it’ s constant care.

I’ ve always gravitated towards works on paper. There ’ s a logistical sense to that because they ’ re easy to store, they don ’t take up a lot of space, and they don ’t weigh a lot. However, they ’ re also fragile. There ’ s always the concerns of acidity, storage, and humidity, so this is stuff that I was well-aware of from my days in college as a printmaker. I’ ve worked with paper conservators. When I see something that is damaged, I have an inkling of what needs to be done.

FD: Had you collected photography before this work?

FD: We ’ ve used the word “ caretaker

” in this conversation. I interpret care as it is needed to house and manage a photography or any art collection. Care could appear in the form of knowing when to ask for help, and then working with experts; providing facilities and resources to conserve the work; performing thorough research; JG: I do have some collections of other things that include press photos. That was kind of simultaneous.

FD: Where do you store these photos?

JG: They are in archival and fireproof storage.

A busy city corner of Randolph and State Streets with buses, cars, and crowds, Chicago, c. 1967.

FD: Returning to the exhibition, do you have a favorite image in this newest exhibition, one that excited you?

JG: Yeah, I would pick the one of the two kids behind the sprinkler. Especially in conjunction with the show ’ s

themes, we

’ re looking through something, looking through water. It had that kind of abstraction taking place, and most everybody knows the sound of a sprinkler going back and forth and the feel of a sprinkler on a hot day. I think it’ s one that viscerally we relate to, and visually I think it is just absolutely stunning insofar as the composition and the format. Her spontaneous compositions are just unbelievable.

She has such a great sense of empathy for her subject matter, especially the rougher sides of life. I think she recognized that we are all just one step away from being there ourselves. I think in some ways photography kept Maier grounded. In a sense, she was a collector of these moments, which I think gave her a sense of purpose.

FD: Lastly, now that you

’ ve handed this work to the Chicago History Museum, what might the CHM add to it?

JG: I have all these collections and I had a goal that by age seventy I was going to start deaccessioning, basically just having half a dozen key works that I love. I know a handful of collectors that held onto their works way too long, and they know they need to let them go, but they can ’t, so the question gets to be who owns what. Do they own their collections or do their collections own them?

There ’ s a sense of relief to let things go on to other people, let them be involved with it, and go through the process of sharing. I was going to ask you a closing question? Do you think by curating exhibitions, is that not a form of collecting?

FD: That’ s really interesting. I would say yes, I am collecting experiences, so much knowledge, relationships— that’ s kind of how you expand your network and your knowledge. I collect books, so I added many more to my collection through this project, but I don ’t feel as if I am a collector in the same way as “ collectors, ” since I am very temporarily with the objects and interact with them with some distance. The thing I kind of collected from Maier is a sense of the complexity of dealing with work of this nature where the artist isn ’t around, doesn ’t have clearly stated intentions, but definitely had clear passion, and now their work is out there in the world. This experience is something I had never encountered before, and it’ s not traditional in the museum world.

A boy and a girl, unidentified, just visible behind a screen a water from the sprinkler they are standing on, Highland Park, Illinois, c. 1962.

Three little girls lined up to speak with Santa and Mrs. Claus, location unknown, c. 1960. A variety of rose blooms in the midst of autumn leaves and damp grass, location unknown, c. 1974.

JG: Everything you answered is exactly why people collect. What I love most about art, whether you make it or collect it, it’ s like a passport, you go to places you normally never would go and meet people you normally never would meet, so you meet your people. You have this really unique position as a curator, you are a collector in the sense—when you put things together it’ s exactly like what a collector is doing—you are in the enviable position where you don ’t have to buy, own, or store the work.

FD: I just collected all the knowledge and had access for a short period of time.

JG: Right, and saw how it fit together. A good collector will come in with a narrative in a sense: why they are collecting certain pieces and how they interconnect with one another. They ’ re just not random selections, so collecting, depending on how serious you are, will have a certain level of difficulty to it.

Most collectors, myself included, don ’t collect thinking “this is my mission. ” At a certain point you stumble across something, and it’ s like “ oh wow, this is

so fabulous

” and suddenly your collection starts to take a turn. It’ s like an organic thing that changes with the collector ’ s sensibility.

Frances Dorenbaum is a curator and art historian from Toronto who specializes in the history of photography. She has collaborated on exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, Northwestern University ’ s Block Museum of Art in Evanston, Illinois, and the Morgan Library & Museum in New York, among others. She holds a MA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is pursuing a PhD in Art History & Visual Culture at York University.

ILLUSTRATIONS | Illustrations are from the collection of the Chicago History Museum. All images by Vivian Maier © The Estate of Vivian Maier. Page 14, ICHi-180257. 16, ICHi180249A. 17. ICHi-181550. 18, top: ICHi-181461; bottom: ICHi-181087. 19, ICHi-181513. 20, top: ICHi-181596; bottom: ICHi-181551. 21, top: ICHi-180779; bottom; ICHi-180790. 22, top: ICHi-180216; bottom: ICHi-180976. 23, ICHi-181122. 24, ICHi-180871. 25, left; ICHi-181660; right: ICHi-181502.