PHOTO:Vivian Maier, Street Photographer
“Vivian Maier, Street Photographer” is a retrospective exhibition featuring the work of a female street photographer whose impressive oeuvre was only discovered at the end of her life – and then immediately caused a worldwide sensation. Vivian Maier (New York, 1926 – 2009) worked as a professional nanny throughout her life. In her free time, she documented life in large American cities such as New York and Chicago, although no one in her immediate circle ever saw the results.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Foam Archive
Vivian Meier left behind an imposing body of work, consisting of 150,000 negatives. Its quality can be compared to that of famed contemporaries like Joel Sternfeld, Joel Meyerowitz, Elliot Erwitt and Garry Winogrand. Photography critic Allan Sekula compared her work with the photography of Swiss-born Robert Frank. Besides photos, she also made countless motion pictures and audio recordings. In 1951, she became a nanny, work she continued to do for the rest of her life. Those who were acquainted with her characterized Maier as extremely intelligent, eccentric, curious and a free spirit. She documented all that caught her attention, in photos as well as sound and motion pictures. The Gensburg’s, a well-to-do Chicago family, who she moved in with in 1956, gave Maier her own bathroom, which became her first darkroom. Her photographic work, at first predominately black-and-white, focused on societal subjects: street life, the disadvantaged and emigrants. After the children grew up, in the 1970s, Maier was forced to seek work with other families. She was then no longer able to develop her own film and her exposed film rolls began to pile up. During that time, Maier experimented with color film, which caused a new approach in her photography and led to more abstraction. Sometime in the late 1990s, Maier put down her camera for good and her possessions were placed in storage while she tried to keep her head above water. In 2007, two years before she died, Maier failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago’s North Side. As a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8mm film were auctioned. Three photo collectors bought parts of her work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow. Maloof had bought the largest part of Maier’s work, about 30,000 negatives, because he was working on a book about the history of the Chicago neighborhood of Portage Park, Maloof later bought more of Maier’s photographs from another buyer at the same auction. Maloof discovered Maier’s name in his boxes but was unable to discover anything about her until a Google search led him to Maier’s death notice in the Chicago Tribune in April 2009.
Info: Foam Photography Museum, Keizersgracht 609, Amsterdam, Duration: 7/11/14-1/2/15, Days & Hours: Sun-Wed: 10:00-18:00, Thu-Fri: 10:00-21:00, www.foam.org
