Vivian Maier: Unseen Work @Fotografiska

JTF (just the facts): A retrospective exhibition consisting of black-and-white and color photographs, as well as color films and other ephemera, hung against variously painted walls on the 4th and 5th floors of the museum. (Installation shots below.)

The following works are included in the exhibition:

  • 140 posthumous gelatin silver prints/contact sheets (in light wood frames): 1952/2020, 1953/2012, 1953/2020, 1954/2012, 1954/2014, 1955/2012, 1955/2014, 1955/2020, 1956/2012, 1956/2014, 1956/2020, 1957/2012, 1957/2014, 1958/2020, 1959/2012, 1959/2020, 1960/2000, 1960/2012, 1960/2014, 1960/2020, 1960s/2014, 1961/2014, 1961/2020, 1962/2020, 1963/2014, 1963/2020, 1964/2014, 1965/2020, 1967/2012, 1967/2020, 1968/2014, 1970/2012, 1970/2014, 1970/2020, n.d./2012, n.d./2014, n.d./2020
  • 15 posthumous chromogenic prints: 1956/2020, 1958/2020, 1959/2020, 1960/2020, 1961/2020, 1962/2004, 1962/2020, 1963/2020, 1975/2020, 1977/2020, 1978/2020, 1991/2020
  • 12 vintage gelatin silver prints (in black frames): 1950, 1952, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1962, n.d.
  • 36 vintage chromogenic prints: 1958, 1960, 1966, 1971, 1975, 1975/1977, 1976, n.d.
  • 10 Super 8 films: 1 minute 14 seconds, 25 seconds, 39 seconds, 59 seconds, 9 seconds, 22 seconds, 36, seconds, 53 seconds, 9 seconds, 2 minutes 12 seconds, 1964, 1969, 1970, 1971, 1974, 2004, n.d.
  • (vitrine): 1 camera, 1 black fedora hat
  • (vitrine): 1 camera
  • (vitrine): 1 film container

The exhibition was organized by diChroma photography and Fotografiska New York in collaboration with the John Maloof Collection, Chicago, and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. The exhibit was first presented at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, from September 15th, 2021 to January 16th, 2022 (here).

Comments/Context: It’s been nearly two decades since John Maloof bought an abandoned storage locker full of negatives, prints, undeveloped film, and Super 8 movies and stumbled upon the work of Vivian Maier. And in the years since, the backstory of the unknown nanny photographer from Chicago has been slowly revealed, via gallery shows and exhibitions (reviewed here, here, and here), photobooks, an Academy Award-nominated documentary film, and widespread press coverage. Seen from afar, the from-scratch building of Maier’s artistic legacy has clearly been a methodical and committed process, with her photographic reputation initially constructed and incrementally broadened by each successive event.

Introductory samplers and edited surveys of Maier’s works have made the rounds internationally over the past few years (largely in smaller venues), but this exhibition is the first museum survey her work has received in the United States. Organized thematically and by subject matter, the curatorial approach here opts for a handful of groupings rather than a strict chronological progression, centering our attention on the ways Maier photographed certain subjects rather than where or when she made the pictures. This jumbles several decades of work into one larger whole and intermingles images made in New York and Chicago (and elsewhere), but successfully amplifies some of the photographic ideas she returned to again and again. Its goal seems less to academically tease out the steps in her evolution as an artist but to offer some straightforward reference points that visitors can take away from the show.

Any Maier retrospective must wrestle with the fact that the artist left her entire archive essentially unedited, and so the many posthumous prints that are presented here are shown uncropped and displayed in light wood frames. This visually differentiates them from the few vintage prints included in the show, which are generally smaller, often cropped, and displayed in black or white frames to set them apart. What this reminds us is that Maier did indeed think carefully about the editing and cropping of her photographs, but that we don’t really know that much about how she might have presented the entirety of her work. This show pieces together some of the available visual evidence and creates a logic for how it can be considered, but whether it accurately represents Maier’s vision as an artist remains a stubborn mystery.

Maier’s self-portraits have deservedly become a kind of signature motif for the photographer – she seems to have made lots of self-portraits and undeniably applied a range of innovative compositional techniques to these images. As seen here, nearly any reflective surface, from a shop window or a patch of storefront glass to a dizzying array of mirrors and displays of mirrors, provided Maier with an opportunity to make a self-portrait, and her modest deadpan face stares back at us from all kinds of quirky reflected setups, creating layered, doubled, and bisected compositions. Maier was also intrigued by the possibilities offered by her own shadow, and she captures herself in this way cast across various surfaces and elongated and distorted by the available light.

Perhaps the simplest and most obvious way to characterize Maier is that she was a mid-century American street photographer, and several of the sections of images on view gather together single portraits of people on the streets, encounters between two or more people, and rhythms and gestures of city life. She observes people on buses and ferries, in train terminals, near shop windows, and on the sidewalk, and catches them reading newspapers, crossing streets, sitting on park benches, arguing with policemen, and doing the work of keeping the city running. Often these pictures are animated by small details that make an ordinary scene seem unexpectedly interesting – the patterns of men’s hats or women’s dresses, the light streaming through windows, the glow behind a bus, the way a child’s balloon obscures a face, a smile with a held purse or wrapped package, a sidelong glance, or even a black cat carried on a shoulder. Many of Maier’s strongest compositions tunnel in even further, observing small details and isolating them. She notices open mouthed yawns, the backs of heads, weathered fingers in laps, touches to faces, the intertwined fingers of a couple, the balancing adjustment of nylons, a hand holding a cigar, and various hats and purses held absentmindedly, each image a kind of improvised city still life.

Since Maier spent most of her days in her role as nanny taking care of children, there are of course plenty of photographs of children in this show, some simply seen on the streets (with an eye for expressions, behaviors, and small moments) and others observed in more domestic settings, like around swimming pools, at the beach, playing with cardboard boxes, or posing behind curtains. In these images, she catches her share of tears, grimaces, and near melt downs, balancing them with the joy of blown bubbles, scrawny legs, matching shoes, a doll ready for traveling, a stick figure companion chalked on a wall, and a nose pressed against a window. When the kids were willing to actually cooperate, Maier got even more inventive with her arrangements, creating shadowed silhouettes, various eyes seen through small holes (including a sheet of plywood and an aluminum pie tin), and a boy seen through the curve of a wooden beach fence.

Much of the rest of the show finds Maier experimenting with composition – dividing frames, playing with found mirrors and available patterns, looking through doors, and introducing color into her decision making. The last section of the show turns to Maier’s images without people, which in many instances quietly edge toward the surreal. She sees wet leaves on the pavement, rubber gloves at a work site, an empty liquor bottle, a newspaper in the gutter, a broom in a pocket, some shoes on a wooden crate, and the spray of water from a backyard sprinkler on a window. This selection feels the most loose and diffuse in the exhibit, largely because it leaves the semblance of narrative behind and centers more on details of form and arrangement.

While this quasi-retrospective does an admirable job of offering a deeper view into Maier’s career, it isn’t as scholarly or definitive as it might be, likely due to the experience-friendly way shows are presented at Fotografiska. But I can also understand why major museums in the US might be wary of taking on a comprehensive Maier project, given the nature of her archive, its unfinished status, and the need for plenty of interpretive decision making. So for the moment, this exhibition is as good a stab at a meaty survey as we’re likely to get, and there are enough standout photographs on view here to merit a patient wander through the galleries. That said, the show left me slightly uneasy, as if the Vivian Maier that was presented was still somewhat out of reach, quietly resisting such a tidy summary.

Collector’s POV: The estate of Vivian Maier is represented by Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York (here). Maier’s work has slowly begun to enter the secondary markets in the past few years (largely as the posthumous prints that make up most of this exhibition), with recent prices ranging between roughly $1000 to $5000.

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