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…
I can’t shake myself free of Vivian Maier—that caretaker with the genius photographic eye, this artist who, it seems, did not wish to be discovered. It wasn’t the gossip that intrigued me. It was the way she framed herself, the serial iterations of the I within the eye. Vivian was, among other things, a self-portrait artist. I, among other things, am a memoirist. How many degrees of epiphany were keeping us apart?
The only way to answer that question would be to write toward it. And so I spent several weeks with Vivian—reading the biographies, returning to the controversial film, studying the online self-portraits, listening to interviews. I would write the piece in fragments, but not as an ABAB braid. I would enter the pursuit in medias res, as if no one among us has time for sturdy biographical throat-clearing, because, honestly, in art, who does? I would make certain, at the same time, that I was not of the myopic opinion that everyone knows Vivian’s story. The essential personal facts would have to be woven (as mystery, suspense, and empathy, not as encyclopedia) through.
The question became: How did Vivian’s artistic enterprise shame or illuminate my own?
How easy it was to write the first five segments. How confounding it became to continue. There would be no way forward, I realized, if I did not name my quest by sifting near-synonyms: Self-scrutiny. Self-interrogation. Self-excavation. Self-absorption… To force myself, with the reader watching, to stumble toward my purpose.
What is self-portrait? What is memoir? Where do they collide? The collision, I realized, having set down the many selfs, lay in the wish to understand, to lay bare the “who,” to risk being thieved. A photographic self-portrait is a framing of a self; it is a marking of time; it is a delve into negative space and shadows; it is an examination of limits; it is a performance. The same is true of memoir. In both cases, 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.
This paragraph of selfs became the essay’s pivot point. Once it was in place, everything else could follow. Not easily—this was one of the hardest essays I have attempted. But in time.
One more note: Because self-portraits and memoirs are essentially mirrors, I wanted the essay to become one. I wanted the rhythm of the beginning to be encountered, again, toward the end—that long paragraph followed by short sentences and white spaces. I wanted to leave Vivian and myself staring at each other, across the endless self-negating, self-promoting, self-thieving abyss.
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.
