Lessons in Self-Portraiture: Vivian Maier and the Thieving of Self by Beth Kephart
In her stunning short essay, “Lessons in Self-Portraiture: Vivian Maier and the Thieving of Self,” Beth Kephart frames the work of a memoirist through the lens of the photographer Vivian Maier. She summarizes the life and work of Maier in a few spare sentences, letting the reader meet or revisit the reclusive photographer who didn’t achieve recognition until after her death in 2009.
Kephart finds kinship and difference in her chosen art form and Maier’s. As a writer of memoir Kephart chooses to write about the self, whereas Maier kept to herself and avoided the limelight. And yet in her obsessive desire to document with her camera, Maier took a number of self-portraits, and it is here that Kephart finds some of the commonality she seeks.
“How many memoirs have I written? How many memoiristic essays? How many poems that center the slender pronoun?” Kephart asks, referring to the first-person pronoun I. How would life have been different if her art had been private like Maier’s? “We who look are thieves,” Kephart tells us. Both the memoirist who writes of the self and the photographer who documents the lives around her rob their environs to support their work. And then there are the self-portraits. Perhaps Maier wasn’t content to remain invisible after all.
Kephart’s author’s note further illuminates her thoughts about including the self in art. “There are risks. The more we stop to frame ourselves, the less we merely live. The more evidence of ourselves that we leave behind, the more latitude we give others to define us.” As writers and readers of creative nonfiction, we are often confronted with the slender I. This thoughtful (and slender) essay lends some powerful insight into how an artist builds the “theater of herself.” —CRAFT
Chasing her apparition. Snapping her own gawp, her glare in the glare of the sun. With her hat on and her hat off. With her eyes on herself or the light. With a compulsion according to wherever a reflection pooled, which is to say: a hubcap; a silver tray; plate glass; machine polish; the sun-struck shell of a horseshoe crab; back-lit building brick, beach sand, roundabouts; curved mirrors; square mirrors; full-length mirrors; hand-held mirrors; fish-eyed surveillance mirrors; private bathroom/bedroom mirrors; mirrors in transit; mirrors quite fixed. She gamed the discontinuous scene until she was its serial star.
Here I am.
I am not yours.
This is my theater.
Shut the door.
Sure: She mostly photographed streetscapes, proximate faces, headlines, accidents, celebrity, the children she cared for—there was love in her, they say, there was curiosity, intelligence, abruptness, speak to me in French or do not speak at all. But the self-portraits are the querulous thing. The argument that carries.
“A striking self-portrait shows her on Fifth Avenue in a smart business suit; her hair is cropped short and the entire androgynous presentation is stunning in contrast to her earlier, more feminine, persona. A deep vertical shadow evocatively obscures half of Maier’s face, illuminating one eye as it stares back at itself.” —Pamela Bannos, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
Everyone knows the story. Nobody knows it. Vivian Maier. Street photographer. Itinerant caretaker of other people’s lives. Such as the children of wealthy parents. Such as (later) the disabled, the aged. She was a woman comprised of irrecoverable parts—a missing father, a missing mother, a missing brother, was there anybody else?—but whose reliability on behalf of those placed in her charge was testified to by references, if you read her own classified ads. Wherever she went—France, Manhattan, Chicago, Los Angeles, Yemen, Vietnam, Switzerland, Thailand—she took pictures. Whatever she accumulated she kept. Until she was her own stratigraphic unit, a traveling conglomerated mass of Rolleiflex medium-format twin-lens reflexes, 35 millimeter workhorses, a Zeiss Contarex, ink-bodied newspapers, rolls of undeveloped film, pencil-annotated prints, books. The things of Vivian Maier grew heavier as time went on, as she walked and she walked in her industrial shoes.
Imagine her coming your way. A woman dragging her life behind. Bending your floorboards. Bunkering your garage. Insisting on no questions asked.
We who look are thieves. And so we look. Lessons in self-portraiture.
How many memoirs have I written? How many memoiristic essays? How many poems that center the slender pronoun? How much fiction that leans on my personal history of small adventure and complicated love? Each story a self-portrait, a precision pull from time. Each story part of the conglomerated mass that drags and now it drags.
Self-scrutiny. Self-interrogation. Self-excavation. Self-absorption. Self-discovery. Self-reflection. Self-construction. Self-actualization. Self-promotion? Promotion to what? Is not the wish a simple wish, a wish to understand?
Everyone knows the story. No one knows it. Maier kept her pictures to herself. Her tens upon thousands of the world beyond. Her dozens of self-studies in black and white, in color. Toward the end, increasingly, she left the negatives undeveloped, so that the only time she saw herself was in the moment of the camera’s making. She saw. The camera saw. The proof was no one’s business, not even, it seems, hers.
That the story of herself became a story of the self is the messy by-product of Vivian’s compounding isolation as the years went on, her loss of caretaking employment, a crisis of general unwellness, and the rental cost of the storage lockers where, at long last, she stowed her massed possessions. Ownership of the storage lockers changed hands. Invoices sent to Vivian went unpaid. The contents of her life went up for auction. Unbeknownst to her. In her dying months.
Were there heirs? Were there secret wishes? Was there a plan? Was it inevitable that Vivian would—slowly and then (thanks to storage-locker lot buyers, opportunists, eBayers, sleuths, filmmakers, historians) somehow suddenly—belong to us?
Her ways of looking. Of framing her own gaze. Of containing her own shadow. Of building the theater of herself. Her private acts made extravagantly public by forces she had failed to conjure.
“Curiously, Maier adamantly refused to have her photograph taken, turning or covering her face if a camera seemed to point her way. The family has a snippet of video that shows Maier noticing the camera and then turning away and leaving the frame.” —Pamela Bannos, Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife
I wonder now who I might have been had I kept myself to myself. Had I glared into my own eyes then glared away and made it nobody’s business but my own. Thought my thoughts, not written them. Lived my scenes, made no notations. Wore the hat, threw the shadow, divided truth from truth from lie—on my own, in my own time, garnering an unsigned life. I would be known to only those who know me. I would be the story no reader judged, no jury rejected, no bookstore failed to sell. I would leave no evidence of my imagination behind. No vocabulary for that which mattered.
I would have wondered but not ramified.
I would have gazed but not codified.
I would have reached for the moment only, then sanctified release.
I would have made art of my life, not life into art.
I would have been who I am not, because I am a writer.
To make art is to risk. It is to wrestle the world into something fixed. It is to leave the self and return to it with evidence of the journey. To make and keep a photograph is to succumb, in the end, to the secret one can’t keep. To dream and write with the slender I is to make a confession of yourself as if someone someday might turn to you and listen. It is to prop the door of your theater open because the sun will strike. Snap upon snap, the artist is found out. There is her face in the hubcap.
BETH KEPHART is a National Book Award finalist, the award-winning author of some forty books in multiple genres, an award-winning memoir teacher, a paper and fiber artist, and the author of the bestseller Substack, The Hush and the Howl. In 2025, Tomorrow Will Bring Sunday’s News: A Philadelphia Story was the Foreword INDIES Editor’s Choice Prize winner in Fiction and My Life in Paper: Adventures in Ephemera was a finalist for the Pattis Family Foundation Creative Arts Book Award. Conversations with Women in Blue: Cyanotypic Dreams, illustrated by the author, is due out from Wolfson Press in March 2027.
Featured image by Jackie Hope, courtesy of Unsplash.
