Vivian Maier and the deaf balloon seller
One of the most iconic street photographers of all time, and her chance encounter with a deaf man.
One day, I made pilgrimage to the MK Gallery see a major retrospective about one of my photography heroines - Vivian Maier.
Maier was an extraordinary photographer who documented people on the streets of New York and Chicago.
You can Google the fuller story about Vivian’s life and work. But here I want to share an image I that I chanced across at MK Gallery.
It shows an unnamed balloon seller in Chicago, 1970s. It’s typical of Vivian’s work - observant, curious, humane. He’s alone, awaiting some business. Perhaps for hours? We wonder what the man is thinking and feeling. Is it patience, boredom, hope, despair? All of these at the same time? There’s a story in that face.
But, on closer inspection, I notice a detail that jumps out for me. The man has an old-style body-worn hearing aid earpiece in his right ear. The wire juts awkwardly upwards before being tucked away inside his shirt collar.
I felt an immediate empathy with this man. As a deaf child and teenager, I also had a body-worn aid and also tucked into my shirt collar and hid the body of the aid itself under my shirt to avoid being mocked for it by my school peers.
I wondered about this man’s ‘story’ and how he came to be selling balloons?
This is the power of a good photograph. And it’s a huge blank that in almost 200 years since Fox Talbot made the first photographic negative, that deaf people have been so largely absent and unrecorded in the mainstream photographic canon - in our photographic history textbooks, archives, galleries and publications?
It’s one of the omissions that drives forwards my Deaf Mosaic project. I want - in 10, 50, 100 years time - for people to be able to look back at the Deaf Mosaic archive and say “Ah, yes, these were the lives, stories and talents of deaf people in the 2020s."
Of course, video, film and TV have a major role to play here. In many ways they’re more ideally-suited for recording deaf people and their visual language. But, photography has a role too: as a way to capture, to freeze, to reveal, to express in still images.
For every picture, as the cliche goes, is worth a thousand words. As Vivian Maier’s tender photo of the deaf balloon seller beautifully shows.
#vivianmaier #deaf #deafmosaic #stepheniliffe