Exhibitions
Vivian Maier Musée du Luxembourg, Paris 15th September 2021– 16th January 2022 by lisa stein
Before her belongings were scattered at several auctions two years prior to her death, very few people had heard of Vivian Maier (1926–2009). After she had stopped paying rent on five storage lockers in a warehouse on the North Side of Chicago, her personal possessions – piles of newspapers, newspaper clippings, clothing, books, letters and found objects – as well as hundreds of thousands of negatives, several thousand prints, hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film, audiotapes and amateur film footage were divided between a handful of hobbyists and collectors in late 2007. The most prominent among these individuals is John Maloof, a real estate agent who placed an absentee bid on the largest box of negatives for $380. He subsequently published and sold Maier’s work online and produced several monographs as well as a documentary about her.1 Maier, who was born in New York to a French mother and an Austrian father and began taking photographs in the French Alps around 1950, has become known primarily for her street photographs of New York (1951–56) and Chicago (1956–2009). The exhibition under review, the first comprehensive survey of her work, includes previously unknown photographs, vintage prints, films and a small number of audio recordings that reveal a different side to the photographer.2 An obscure self-portrait, displayed in the first of nine thematically arranged exhibition spaces, seems to encapsulate Maier’s extraordinary life and body of work (Fig.28). The photograph depicts a convex surveillance mirror suspended in the dark corner of a shop. Below it is a magazine rack and warped in its reflection are fluorescent ceiling lights, imparting a lunar glow, and shelves lined with books. In the bottom third of the mirror two figures can be made out, a man browsing a shelf with his back turned toward us, and Maier, facing us, 1196
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expressionless, the lens of her Rolleiflex positioned in the dead centre of the image. The magazines visible on the rack are indicative of Maier’s propensity for collecting and photographing news media, and their titles – Speed Age, Motor Life and Air Progress – hint indirectly at the radical transformation in modes of artistic expression brought on by the progression of technology in Maier’s lifetime, particularly in the medium of photography. Further, her incorporation of a mirror is typical of Maier’s formally inventive selfportraits. Photographs of her reflection in mirrors or shop windows and of her shadow projected onto a lawn or brick wall demonstrate an acute awareness of her role as both ‘surveyor and surveyed’.3 Maier invariably presented herself in relation to her environment; when she photographed her mirror image she rarely looked directly into the lens but captured herself in the act of looking, either at her own reflection or her surroundings. Her exploration of identity is taken to the extreme in another ‘self-portrait’, taken in Chicago in 1959, of a life-insurance check addressed to her, balancing precariously on a handbag. In an essay on the discovery of Maier and her subsequent ‘invention’, the art historian and critic Abigail
27. Untitled, by Vivian Maier. Vintage chromogenic print, 25.5 by 20.2 cm. (Estate of Vivian Maier; courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; exh. Musée du Luxembourg, Paris).
Solomon-Godeau has argued that Maier’s ‘camera “eye” and [. . .] subjective “I” were inextricably linked’ and that she ‘used the camera to confirm her very existence to and for herself ’.4 Similarly, the curator and writer Marvin Heiferman has described Maier’s self-portraits as a form of ‘self-inquiry that is more existential than anecdotal or sociological’.5 These conceptions of Maier’s self-portraits as what SolomonGodeau refers to as ‘wholly solipsistic’ are plausible considering the fact that despite taking hundreds of thousands of photographs, Maier, who worked as a nanny, had no intention of ever showing them; her known extant prints make up only a fraction of her vast archive. In her biography of Maier, the researcher Pamela Bannos notes that ‘what is now known as the “mystery” of Vivian Maier stems from her inclination not to share of herself [sic] or her photographic work’.6 Both Solomon-Godeau and Bannos have contested the image of Maier that has emerged since her ‘discovery’, which they argue was largely manufactured by the individuals that purchased her work. As Solomon-Godeau points out, Maloof is the ‘most energetic and visible’ among these individuals (most of the works in the exhibition are from the Maloof Collection). His documentary Finding Vivian Maier (2013), in which he interviewed families that employed her, certainly cemented her image as the mysterious ‘nanny photographer’. Bannos set out to correct to this narrative – which she argues has been defined ‘by presumptions about and representations of [Maier] as a woman’7 – in her biography, from which Maier emerges not as a hobby photographer but a serious artist. The exhibition testifies to both Maier’s skill and her fearlessness, particularly as a street photographer. Images in the second gallery space reveal Maier’s sensitivity to subtle interactions between individuals – such as two seemingly unrelated women reading the same newspaper or a man and his baby playing with a balloon – as well as her aptitude for using light and shadow to create dramatic compositions of buildings
the burlington magazine | 163 | december 2021
17/11/2021 23:28