Outlaw art exhibition
Toronto gallery’s stunning collection of Vivian Maier photographs is caught in a legal quagmire. Catch it while you can
Many by now have heard the curious tale of Vivian Maier, the Chicago-based nanny of no otherwise special import who, shortly after her death in 2009, was revealed to be an astonishingly gifted street photographer. Her posthumous fame produced an Oscarnominated documentary in 2015, Finding Vivian
Maier, and legions of followers. It also produced a hot market of buyers eager to own some of her work, the value of which now likely stretches into the millions of dollars.
So it’s more than a little odd to find 46 of her pictures now hanging in the Stephen Bulger Gallery, one of the country’s top photography dealers — he owns some 15,000 negatives of her work — but not a single one for sale. It’s not due to lack of demand.
“We get phone calls, literally, every day,” Bulger said recently. “But I’m cautious. I can’t risk everything I have for this.”
Bulger’s prudence is well-founded. Earlier this year, Maier, whose posthumous renown flowed as much from her mysterious circumstances as her obvious gifts, became embroiled in a murky legal standoff over who owned the copyright to her many thousands of images.
The dispute has left Bulger’s hands tied. With copyright now in dispute, any sale or fee could put him in violation of U.S. copyright law. Even stranger, the threat is coming not from a litigious distant Maier relative, seeking to cash in on her sudden recent fame, but from the government of Cook County, Ill.
To understand the tangle, the clock needs to turn back nine years, to the 2007 auction where Maier, who kept her pictures almost entirely to herself, first came to light.
Maier, by then in her 80s, had been storing her negatives in five containers at a Chicago storage company. For reasons only she knew — she had been set up in an apartment by the Gensburg family, for whom she had worked for many years and had a modest pension and social security income — she stopped making payments on the containers. The standard storage contract transfers ownership of all contents to the storage company after a period of non-payment, and in effort to recoup some of their losses, the company moved to auction them off.
A Chicago auctioneer, Roger Gunderson, bought the entire contents of the five lockers for $250 and started sifting through. The negatives, shot mostly in the ’60s and ’70s, struck him as potentially alluring for nostalgia buffs. He parceled them out by location — Maier had arranged them by place: Chicago, Paris, New York — and sold them all to about a dozen buyers for less than $10,000 (U.S.).
One of the buyers, John Maloof, bought a lot of 30,000 Chicago negatives for about $400. Not sure what to do with them, he started scanning them and putting them up for sale on eBay. His ambitions were modest: He started at $10 per image, but demand spiked. He upped the price: To $20, then $50, then $100.
Then, out of the blue, he was contacted by Allan Sekula, a photographer and academic in California who had seen the auctions. “He saw the quality of the work,” Bulger said, “and he told John, ‘You know, if these really are by one person, you really should stop selling them on eBay.’ ”
Maloof, awakened to the fact that he might be on to something big, hastily ceased his eBay operation and started buying back what he could of what he had already sold. Meanwhile, Jeffrey Goldstein, a Chicago artist who had caught wind of Maier’s unfolding mystery, and, like Sekula, was struck by the work, had been acquiring as many of the negatives parceled out by Gunderson as he could.
When the two men crossed paths, they partnered up, hunted down the remaining materials and set about establishing what they believed to be true: That if Maier truly had no heir, their title to her property would be clear.
What they knew for certain was that when she died at age 83, she had left no will, and had no known next of kin. She never married, had no children and her one sibling, a brother, died in 1977 at a psychiatric hospital in New Jersey.
They hired a genealogist, who tracked her lineage back to France — Maier, born in New York, had a French mother and an Austrian father — where they found a cousin, Sylvain Jaussaud.
They presented their research to a French judge who, convinced by the evidence, declared Jaussaud the rightful heir. Maloof offered the cousin a one-time copyright buyout fee of $5,000 (U.S.), which he accepted, and assigned copyright to Goldstein for his portion.
Here, the story should end, with the passionate stewards of one of the great, overlooked image-makers of the 20th century moving forward to cement her legacy. It does not. On securing copyright, Maloof’s error was not closing the estate, legally, with Cook County. So in 2014, when David Deal, a Virginia-based lawyer and Maier fan, appeared, the window was open for disruption, which is what Deal did.
Deal, backtracking on Maloof’s genealogy, produced Francis Baille, another alleged French cousin. He petitioned Cook County to name Baille the rightful heir, but it backfired. The county instead rejected all claims and put Maier’s state into countyadministered probate, because she had left no will.
The county also asserted a claim to all copyright for Maier’s works, dismissing the deal Maloof and Goldstein had struck with Jaussaud, and casting all of their now-thriving business into uncertainty.
Maloof, who owned 90 per cent of Maier’s materials, stood patiently by, quietly negotiating with the county. But Goldstein, leery of a protracted legal battle that might drag in his other assets, was on edge. The county wanted back-payments on all proceeds gained from sales of Maier’s work, dating back years.
In fall of last year, the county was demanding the negatives from Goldstein, to register them for copyright, Bulger says, and was threatening to send a sheriff if he didn’t surrender them. In a December phone conversation with Bulger, with whom he had worked to produce two previous Maier shows in Toronto, a frazzled Goldstein confessed the depths of his anxiety about potentially losing Maier’s works for good.
“I suggested, ‘Why don’t you just ship them up to Canada?’ ” Bulger laughed. To his surprise, Goldstein called back the next day with an offer: “He asked me if I wanted to buy his negatives,” Bulger said. “I said I did, we settled on a price and that was that. And then I hung up the phone,” Bulger chuckles, “and thought, ‘What did I just do?’ ”
With the spectre of the Cook County probate demands still hanging heavy over all, Bulger, with 15,000 of Maier’s negatives now stored in his gallery, started to fret. “I was helping Jeff, and I was protecting the work,” Bulger said. “But I started thinking, ‘Am I a criminal for doing this?’”
He called Maloof, who was waiting patiently back in Chicago for the county to reach its conclusion. Maloof told Bulger that no, the title for the negatives — the actual, physical property — was clear, and that what the county was pursuing — nominally, in the interest of a clear heir — was copyright only.
Then, in May, the Chicago Tribune reported that Maloof had reached a copyright arrangement with Cook County that allowed his sales and exhibition of Maier’s images to continue, but the details of the arrangement were sealed from the public (Bulger still has no knowledge of its terms). In mid-June, as he was preparing to open his current Maier show, Bulger received a letter from a Toronto-based law firm representing the county.
“It said that it would view any of my activities as a copyright violation,” Bulger said. It knocked him back. He had planned the show two years in advance, spending almost $50,000 to produce it. Now, a week before opening, he couldn’t just stop.
So Bulger went ahead, crafting an arresting show of Maier’s subtle wonders — children playing at the beach, Chicago street scenes, the nuanced textures of faces and hands — with not a thing for sale.
“I can make prints from my negatives for my personal enjoyment,” according to copyright law, Bulger says. “That’s all I’m doing here.” (On his website, he reveals to eager buyers what might be a little dubiousness at the county’s dealings: “We hope to secure a copyright arrangement with the rightful heirs of the Estate of Vivian Maier in order to fully promote her photographs,” the site says.)
What he’s doing, ultimately, is much more than that. Maier’s gifts were buried by fate, and unearthed by chance. Bulger is loath to let a legal quagmire lock her work away again.
“We all recognize the tragedy of it,” Bulger says. “Vivian was a victim of her time — her pictures were never seen, never shown, and it’s not because of lack of quality. And now, after all this, to let her become a victim of these circumstances? It just doesn’t seem right.”