Dominique Fortier finds her story in Vivian Maier, the photographer who never saw herself as an artist

Dominique Fortier has spent much of her career dialoguing with other artists' lives through her writing — Emily Dickinson in Des villes de papier, now the mysterious photographer Vivian Maier in her new novel Chambres noires. What draws her to these hidden figures?

"These are destines whose we wonder whether they are failed, or instead the ultimate expression of success," Fortier said. Both artists created in secret and received recognition only after death. Both pursued their craft with an intensity that defied explanation, and neither seemed to see themselves as artists in the way the world might have counted them.

Vivian Maier, born in 1926, worked primarily as a nanny in Chicago families for decades, shooting tens of thousands of photographs that weren't discovered until the end of her life and after her death in 2009. Her work — documentary, intimate, artistically invaluable — has since achieved a kind of myth status, elevated by the very mystery that shrouds her life. The few people who knew her remain her closest witnesses.

"Maier developed her negatives but rarely printed them," Fortier noted. "Only the gesture mattered." Perhaps she wasn't seeking recognition or even calling herself an artist. Perhaps she was seeking herself — a link with another version of her own consciousness. "I think it's very much her own self she's trying to grasp," Fortier said.

For the novel, Fortier drew from testimonies of the children Maier cared for — likely the only people with whom she formed true bonds. "These are probably the only people with whom she had real connections. It's from their stories that I constructed my character," she said. She resisted making Maier into Mary Poppins. "She was very austere." The book instead uses Maier's life as a canvas for exploring the theme of the double — duality that Maier herself embodied in her self-portraits, where she often appears split or reflected.

That notion of doubling became central to Chambres noires because Fortier's own story parallels Maier's in a profound way. Fortier grew up in a family where there should have been two children but she was alone — a sister lost, a ghostly presence never discussed but always felt. "This sort of ghostly presence, of which I had an acute awareness but of which we never spoke, marked very early my relationship to the world," she said.

Fortier emphasizes she wasn't writing biography but rather allowing Maier's life to illuminate her own artistic origins. "Plenty of people have also written on Dickinson, and we will never be finished. What's interesting is what we infuse of ourselves, and that oblique gaze that comes with our own experiences." In writing Chambres noires, she traced her family history — the disappeared sister — and uncovered the wellspring of her voice.