We had an unintended, somewhat depressing, Netflix theme going recently: documentaries of forgotten women who led enigmatic lives. Given the attention they have received in recent years, it’s as if their lives only became interesting after their deaths. You can certainly read all about the stories of Joyce Vincent and Vivian Maier on Wikipedia, but from such sources you only get, as Emily Dickinson would say,“the facts but not the phosphorescence.”

What makes these documentaries necessary are the detective work the filmmakers perform as they answer the questions we as viewers have about their subjects’ lives. More to the point, the films attempt to find and interview the people who knew these women and whose recollections, of necessity, can construct only incomplete pictures.

Finding Vivian Maier

For Finding Vivian Maier, pictures is the operative word.

The filmmaker, John Maloof, bought a trunk of her belongings at an auction house, discovered sheets of her negatives, and was intrigued by their content and artistry.  He sought out everything else she had squirreled away and stuffed into a crammed storage unit.

It was clear from what she left behind that Vivian was a hoarder: newspapers, clothes, hats, shoes, trinkets, election badges, receipts, bills, uncashed tax refund checks, bus and rail tickets – ephemera of all sorts. But along with all of that were thousands and thousands of B&W negatives, hundreds of rolls of unexposed B&W film, color slides, and Super–8 movies from the early 1970s.

Maloof was captivated by her guerrilla street photography, her formal experiments with self-portraits, and the sometimes playful pictures she took of the children and families for whom she worked as a nanny. As a photographer, she got close to her subjects in ways that were extraordinary. Based on the evidence of her negatives, she took her craft seriously and knew that she had an eye.

(Maloof’s web site contains galleries of her photos and I strongly urge you to spend some time with them, if you’ve never seen them before. They’re both time capsules and timeless.)

To Maloof, and to others who saw these pictures, she was clearly an artist. Why, then, had no one ever heard of her? Why did she make so few prints of these remarkable images and do nothing with them? Her life – which this intensely private woman held close to her – and her choices were a mystery he felt moved to solve.

Maloof’s documentary (co-directed with Charlie Siskel) starts out being about him, his background, and his discovery of and increasing obsession with Maier. As the movie goes on, though, the detective work on Maier’s life takes center stage and Maloof wisely steps into the background where possible.

The most fascinating interviews, for me, were with the adults whom she had looked after as children and their memories of seeing Maier’s behavior when she was unobserved by her employers. While it was clear to all who met her that she was an eccentric, the children sometimes – in some cases, often – saw that eccentricity veer scarily to either aloof or threatening behavior.

The persistent question from Maloof, the professional photographers and artists he interviews, and Vivian’s acquaintances (she never really had “friends”) is: why did she keep her amazing photos a secret? Why did she do nothing with them? The impression given is that Vivian could have had a career as a significant artist had she only gone public with her photographs.

The film cannot answer that question, of course, though it seems to Maloof the primary mystery of Vivian’s legacy. But it didn’t strike me as a mystery at all. To me, the obvious answer to why she never cashed in on her remarkable photographs is, “Because that’s not why she took them.” She evidently got out of her picture-taking exactly what she wanted. Putting aside the fact that she appeared not to know any artists nor sought out any sort of artistic community nor even bothered to properly care for her film and negatives, it seemed clear to me that Vivian had no ambitions or inclinations to be a professional photographer.

She did not treat her photography the way most of us treat a hobby, as a refuge or comfort or renewal from our daily grind. Picture-making did not seem to give her any emotional comfort or reward. At times it appeared to be a compulsion, certainly, but not something that gave her pleasure.

Why take all those pictures then? Because the camera offered Vivian a way to hoard ephemeral things: moments, images, impressions, anything that caught her attention. As long as she knew she had the negatives or undeveloped film, then she knew she could get back to them “someday.” One of the interviewees said Maier had so many newspapers stacked in her attic room, her father had to install a steel beam to bolster the sagging floor. She treated her negatives the same way as she treated her receipts, hats, clothes, and newspapers: it was all the same to her.

Vivian clearly suffered some trauma in her life that led to her eccentric behaviors. Taking pictures may have been a way to use the camera, which was always around her neck, as a buffer between her and the world while still enabling her to participate as an observer and collector, as someone who could control the experience.

A new acquaintance asked her one time what she did. She answered, “I’m a spy.” The filmmakers imply she led a double life, working as a nanny while taking pictures of both the world and herself – a secret she held to herself as tightly as she did many others.

Dreams of a Life

Of the two films, Dreams of a Life is definitely the sadder and more disturbing movie, and the one that gnaws at me when I stop to think about it. Finding Vivian Maier, while not a light piece, has the grace of Vivian’s art uplifting it and Maloof’s dogged detective work to uncover her life’s mysteries though not all her secrets. And there is the successful recovery of a trove of photographs that would otherwise have been lost forever.

Dreams of a Life is more spare and troubling. Not least because Joyce Vincent left so little evidence of her life and activities. Former friends and co-workers who knew her can describe what she looked like, how she behaved, the stories she told, but these are only the outer edges of her life as observed by others with the center left tantalizingly, frustratingly blank. There is little to celebrate.

The film starts with the death of Joyce Vincent – or rather, the discovery of her body. To the best anyone can reconstruct, the 38-year-old died in her bedsit in a rather shabby part of London in December 2003. But her body wasn’t discovered until January 2006. What was found were her skeletal remains; as one interviewee chillingly put it, her body basically “melted into the carpet.” With no soft tissues available for forensic examination, no one can know how she died. She was only positively identified via dental records.

The story angle picked up by the media was what one would expect: how could this have happened? Where was her family? Her friends? Why did no one try to find her or call her or look her in over 2 years? Where was the landlord? The neighbors? And where were the public services? When her body was found, the television and heating were still on. And another grim, poignant detail: her body was surrounded by wrapped Christmas presents with no name tags. Her death – and the absence of concern about her absence from the world – became a metaphor about the lack of personal relationships in a crowded, always-connected modern society.

It’s a haunting story that caught the attention of the filmmaker Carol Morley. She took out ads soliciting information from anyone who knew Joyce, slowly locating and tracking down friends, acquaintances, co-workers, former partners, an old roommate. The family declined to participate in the movie.

As Vivian became Maloof’s muse, so Joyce became Morley’s. The timeline she created to track Joyce’s movements through her life, and particularly her difficult last years, is glimpsed throughout the film. The jumble of whiteboard notes, photographs, and news clippings introduce episodes in Joyce’s life, interview subjects, and even suggest events that Morley did not or could not include. Without information from Joyce’s older sisters to fill in needed gaps, and without eyewitnesses to key points in Joyce’s life, the movie’s narrative is maddeningly patchy with too many questions left unanswered.

But Morley deftly turns that lack of information into an opportunity. What had been blank space instead becomes an empty canvas where every interview subject can paint their own picture of Joyce.

They describe Joyce as beautiful, funny, charming, someone who held increasingly responsible jobs – she was the person who looked absolutely put together and undoubtedly led a remarkable life. She was the center of attention – especially men’s – when she walked into a room. She seemed an innocent and trusting soul. How could anyone so attractive and charming not lead a fascinating life?

But other details of her personality emerge from the interviews. She didn’t talk about her family. She said her father was dead when he wasn’t. The most significant detail to me was how she took on a new boyfriend’s circle of friends as her circle yet never spoke or talked about any other friends she might have had before. When a relationship ended, she drifted away from the circle and was rarely seen by them afterward. It was as if, with every new job and every new relationship, she shed her old skin – old apartment, old friends –  and re-entered the world as a new person. A blank slate for everyone, including herself.

The most compelling interviewees, to me, were a former boyfriend Martin and her no-nonsense former flatmate Catherine. Martin seems the quintessential, conventional nice guy who tried helping Joyce and wonders if he could have done more. Catherine, on the other hand, is quick with her judgments and clear on what she knows. Her story of the last time she saw Joyce had me gobsmacked – not just Joyce’s behavior, but Catherine’s cool, unsentimental reaction to it. Catherine and Martin would have been great friends to have in your corner and may have counter-balanced Joyce’s maddening lack of focus. But Joyce deliberately pulled away from them as she pulled away from everyone and seems mainly to have drifted through her life.

Morley enjoys throwing her interview subjects a curveball on-camera to get their reactions. In one, she plays a tape of a song Joyce had recorded, ending with a giggly sign-off. They’re startled to hear her voice. They laugh and then say the cute sign-off sounds just like Joyce. Except for Catherine, who says it sounded not at all like Joyce. These contrasts become an interrogation of not only who Joyce really was – something no one will ever know – but how she is remembered and how incomplete those memories are.

If every one has their own image of Joyce, then Morley does too. Her dreams of Joyce’s life are presented in re-created scenes from Joyce’s childhood and adult life based on stories Joyce told her friends. The actress Zawe Ashton plays Joyce in scenes – a disastrous birthday party, dancing at a club – that are recollected by the interviewees. The movie re-creates the discovery of Joyce’s body and the subsequent cleanup and forensic investigation of the apartment but with no attempt to visualize her corpse (I am thankful that Morley does not reproduce any photographs taken at the scene). The movie cuts between scenes of a vibrantly alive Joyce and the grim clean-up of her desolate apartment.

I don’t like recreations, as a rule; I can see the need to visually liven up a stretch of the film that would otherwise only have talking heads. But if you can’t document what actually happened, then it’s not a re-creation, it’s a fabrication. One moment particularly angered me. In it, Ashton portrays Joyce singing along to a record with a hairbrush as her microphone, echoing an earlier scene when the 5-year-old Joyce “performs” for her sisters and mother. As the record finishes, the adult Joyce stops the singalong and breaks down in tears. I understand that this is Morley’s vision of the Joyce she feels she has come to know, but to me, it was needlessly sentimental glop and a violation of Joyce and her memory. Her story is sad enough without this scene gratuitously amping it up.

Both movies haunted me

Vivian and Joyce kept the world at arm’s length for reasons no one will know. They were solitary women seeking a family, I think, and never quite finding it or quite fitting in. These movies record how the people who knew them saw them, interpreted them. And the movies themselves are not objective; they frame their subjects just as interpretively.

Vivian’s life is a mystery full of clues, and her legacy is the body of work she knowingly created, albeit without any plan. Was she an artist, as so many of the commentators in the movie think? Is that why she took all of those pictures? Or was taking pictures something she was compelled to do, the same way she hoarded newspapers and receipts? Fortunately, these questions don’t have to be answered to enjoy her remarkable photographs. Vivian found a place in the world, at last. And her story, the mysteries of her life, add a captivating allure to the images the world was very close to losing.

But it’s Joyce’s story that moves me on a deeper, sadder level and that I think will stick with me longer. Partly for the simple pathos of dying alone and forgotten. Partly because this was a tragedy that could have been prevented. I want to believe that she could have reached out more and that others could have tried a little harder to reach her (though the film makes clear that in her last months, she was deliberately in hiding and was avoiding contact with everyone from her old life). In the end, it was easier to lose touch than to maintain it.

And her story moves me to ask questions of my own life, as Morley intended it to. Because we’ve all known people for intense periods of time, however fleetingly: work, school, the other parents in the playgroup, hobbies, church. When I look back over my life, I have carried very few people with me into the present-day from previous jobs, from all the arts classes and community theater productions I did. I spent four very intense years getting my master’s, worked on many class projects with my fellow students and teachers, and got to know a few very well. Yet today, I am in only occasional touch with two or three. How well did we all really get to know each other? That’s the haunting question Joyce Vincent’s life raises: will anyone come looking for me?

By the way, I referred to both women here using their first names rather than their last names because I think it gentler than treating their shades as simply fodder for a stupid blog post. Kindness should be extended to these women even after the fact of their deaths.

Updated on 2026-08-06: Originally posted on March 5, 2015, but the post got eaten by micro.blog gramlins. Republishing.

“Greater forensic emphasis”

Finished reading: God’s Children by Archibald Rutledge, Henry Middleton Rutledge, Seldon B. Hill 📚Bought at a bookstore on Front Street in Georgetown, SC. A reprint of a 1947 book of reminiscences by Archibald Rutledge, a poet, writer, and essayist on natural history topics in his day, particularly his beloved Low Country landscape of coastal South Carolina. Rutledge had been in the running for the Pulitzer for poetry and the Nobel for his body of work, but the arch, patrician voice of the essays seems almost quaintly mannered to my modern ears. Also dated is his paternalistic attitude to the black workers (the “Children” of the book’s title) who live and work on the remains of his generations-old family plantation. He writes of the black workers he grew up with with great respect and praise for their skills and knowledge, and there is much talk of the affection that exists between he and them. But when Rutledge gives them an order to do something, it’s expected that they will do it. A modest volume that is disquieting for what it does not say about life on an old plantation in the Old South.

I tend to read first thing in the morning in my rocking chair, with my coffee, with the morning light coming in over my shoulder onto the page or Kindle.

A trick I picked up to keep my reading habit from flagging is from Andy Miller’s book The Year of Reading Dangerously. The way he got through his reading project was to read 50 pages in the morning before getting on with the business of the day.

I find that rate very compatible with my current life circumstances, as the morning is the only time I really control before the day’s obligations sink their claws into me. Depending on the book, a reading session can take 60-90 minutes, and I can get through a ~250 page book in about five days, more or less. By reading that much material in a session, I am less likely to lose track of the plot or characters and it keeps my interest in the book alive. If I’m facing time constraints or I miss the morning pages, then I’ll aim to read 25 or so pages later in the day.

It’s too easy to set a book down and say, “I’ll get to it later.” I’ve put off profligate reading for many, many years, and now is the time of my life to sit down with my coffee and enjoy all the pleasures I’ve been waiting to do “someday.” Someday is today.

Finished reading: Keeper of the House by Rebecca T. Godwin 📚 From the Durham NC Public Library. Inspired by the Sunset Lodge, what’s most remarkable about this novel is the voice of its black first-person narrator, Minyon Marigault, who arrives at the Hazelhedge brothel at 14 years old from her Gullah community as a housekeeper and becomes, eventually, keeper of the house and its secrets. I became a little impatient with some of the melodramatic events and the somewhat stagey characters – Miss Addie, the madam, among them. But I was completely captivated by the voice of Minyon, her language, her turns of phrase, and her growing sense of her power and place in the world.

Finished reading: Sunset Lodge in Georgetown: The Story of a Madam by David Gregg Hodges 📚 Purchased at the Rice Museum gift shop in Georgetown, SC.

A fun book of local history by South Carolina native Hodges that is actually three smaller booklets jostling uncomfortably alongside each other.

The first – and best – booklet is the history of the Sunset Lodge brothel that operated three miles south of Georgetown, SC, from 1936 to 1969. The madam, Hazel Weisse, operated her business with ironclad rules for her “sporting ladies” and an equally disciplined relationship with the local community. She was always careful to never rub the town’s nose in the Lodge’s business, she contributed large amounts of money to local charities and the local economy, she cultivated relationships with local law enforcement and rich protectors, and so the community largely turned a blind eye to her brothel. Even while the sheriffs shut down other brothels, hers remained in business from the Roosevelt to the Nixon administrations.

Hodges, an amateur historian, also provides an excellent, compact history of the Georgetown County region from pre-Civil War days to the ’70s, and a glimpse at the industry of prostitution that dotted the Atlantic coast’s harbors and military bases.

A short chapter on Hazel Weisse’s life, from her early years in Chicago to managing a brothel in South Carolina, is necessarily sketchy. She protected her past as carefully as she did her reputation, and Hodges doggedly found and reported every scrap of documentary info he could find. But Weisse remained an essentially unknowable character and hovers over the narrative rather than dominates it; despite the book’s subtitle, Sunset Lodge in Georgetown: The Story of a Madam is not a story of her life. Rather, Hodges can report only the externals of her life and the stories of those who remembered her. She remains a tantalizingly unknowable presence. So the book instead becomes more a remembrance of Sunset Lodge and the stories that grew from it.

The second booklet – which takes up most of Sunset Lodge in Georgetown – is a storytelling project where Hodges reproduces in smoothed-out one- to three-page narratives some of the interviews he conducted with people who visited the Lodge, worked there, did business with Weisse, or otherwise had stories to tell about this legendary place and its inhabitants.

These are odd little narratives. Their titles reflect job roles – “IRS Agent,” “Deputy Sheriff,” “Minister,” “Cab Company Owner” – or stories of experiences – “Father and Son,” “First Time,” “Christmas Eve.”

Hodges states in his introduction that he anonymized the interviews and often combined some stories into a single narrative; sometimes, all he had was a punchline and then he worked backward to create a suitable narrative lead-in. If that’s the case, was this a story worth telling? I could never be sure how much of what I was reading was actual experience versus a useful fiction needed to fill in a story’s gaps.

The bulk of the book is taken up by these stories and reading them feels … odd. There’s little of the satisfying detail of corroborated history, but there are flashes of everyday life in Georgetown, of remembered history, that show how the locals accommodated the house: a little girl who stares wide-eyed at the sporting ladies entering the doctor’s office for their weekly check-up while her mother stiffens with outrage, the dress shop owner who carries the latest fashions to outfit the working girls, the postal worker who knows to mail packages sent by the girls to their families in plain brown wrapping, the sheriff who shuts down the clergymen gathered in his office to demand the house be closed.

But then there are other stories that limp to the finish line, or barely have anything to do with the Lodge or Weisse, and carry zero emotional weight. Or there are stories with the well-rounded shape of oft-told jokes or anecdotes that could be said about any whorehouse.

The lighthearted tone of this grab bag of stories jostles uncomfortably alongside the third booklet: Hodges’ mixed feelings about taking on the Sunset Lodge as a history project.

Hodges describes his own history of stumbling across the Lodge, and the fun he had doing the detective work of consulting newspapers and census records to corroborate facts. He especially enjoyed being a guest speaker at community clubs, where afterward people would tell him stories about the Lodge or put him on the trail of other people to interview.

But he’s also ashamed of enjoying himself a little too much and of the attention his topic brought him. As a conservative man and an elder in his church, Hodges makes it clear in several places he considered Weisse’s operation immoral and wrong. How many families, he asks, how many marriages were damaged because the menfolk frequented the Sunset Lodge? Fair enough. Only a few stories really push against the “good, clean, dirty fun” aspect of the Lodge legend: one where a father pays for his son’s first sexual experience, another where a group of high school girls joy-ride through the Lodge’s driveway and one of the girls recognizes her father’s car.

The last sentences of his book, after acknowledging Weisse’s business prowess: “It is not an excuse to do well that which should not be done at all. Perhaps other houses of prostitution will find it impossible to stay in business if local laws are vigorously enforced.”

Wow. After spending a whole book practically reveling in stories about the Lodge and documenting the light that sex work, and proximity to sex work, throws on human behavior, and considering how much he enjoyed talking to groups about and researching the Lodge (still giving pleasure long after its demise!), collapsing all that emotion and legend and history into a grim middle-class “crime shouldn’t pay” bumper sticker pops the balloon. It does Hodges’ work a real disservice.

Finished reading: Seven Lessons for Dreamers and Makers by SCAD 📚

Purchased at the SCAD gift shop in Savannah, GA. April 2026. A decent pamphlet for SCAD students and prospective students, with some good tips on developing healthy creative habits and creative/professional networks while in school, with supporting examples of SCAD alums getting jobs with major corporations or starting their own businesses. Probably very useful to an undergrad after their 7th or 8th read. And maybe they’ll have a good time in school, too, though reassuring students – and their parents – that creative activities will eventually pay off seems more the emphasis here.

Neighborhood newsletters: filling a gap left by local newspapers’ decline - 9th Street Journal