Why Vivian Maier’s Street Photography Was So Important

It was in the quiet click of her Rolleiflex camera that Vivian Maier immortalized the world around her. From bankers to unhoused people asleep on park benches, to couples embracing, to, often, herself: Her subjects spanned a huge range in the more than 150,000 negatives taken during her life. For nearly five decades, Maier meticulously attended to the life around her, no matter where she went. Yet her work remained private, stored away in boxes without the money or resources to develop them.

By the time she died in 2009, at 83, her stockpile of negatives almost slipped into obscurity. However, in 2007, her life’s work was auctioned off at a local thrift house in Chicago to John Maloof, a local historian and collector. Intrigued by her street photography, Maloof developed the negatives one by one, gradually unveiling Maier’s extensive archive on Flickr. These forgotten prints, undeveloped for decades, sparked an unprecedented ardor for Maier’s work just months after her death.

For the first time in New York—her birthplace—a portion of Maier’s colossal archive is on view at Fotografiska for “Unseen Work” until September 27th. Curated by Anne Morin, director of the cultural management firm diChroma Photography, this exhibition was initially presented in a different iteration at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2021. It features more than 200 thematically arranged works spanning from the 1950s to 1990s, including color photos taken with a Leica, Super 8 films, and various audio recordings. This homecoming show places Maier’s work within the context of the city that shaped her eye while cementing her legacy—increasingly relevant in the age of social media and self-perception.

“Vivian Maier is such a big phenomenon nowadays because this problem of [the] self-portrait resonates with the selfie culture we see today,” said Morin. “All that crisis of identity we are viewing on social media, with tons of selfies, finds an echo in the work of Vivian Maier. Perhaps 30 years ago, she would not have been so famous or so interesting because the selfie was not so important at that time.”

Born in 1926 to a French mother and an Austrian father, Maier lived a modest life in her childhood. Her father out of the picture, she briefly lived with her mother in New York City with her mother, Marie, and Jeanne Bertrand, a photographer. They then spent a brief stint in a small French village close to her mother’s family, where, at 23 years old, she received her first camera, a Kodak Brownie, as a gift and began to experiment.

By 1951, Maier had returned to the U.S., picking up work in a sweatshop before working as a nanny in Southampton, Long Island. There, she started her long and unobserved career behind the lens, spending her free time in New York City attending museum exhibitions or spending hours at the cinema. A year later, Maier purchased her first Rolleiflex camera. In the city, she began to snap pictures of everyday life, such as a humorous 1953 image of two older men leaning over a hose or a sentimental photo of a couple looking out over the ferry to the New York skyline.

Her earliest pictures, including a 1953 portrait capturing a child’s reflection upside down in a mirror, or her 1954 self-portrait taken in a department store window, underscore Maier’s inherent ability to quickly compose her photos. The composition is marked by small oddities and subtle camera tricks, making her documentation both humorous and singular.

“She had the faculty to underline the extraordinary in ordinary life,” Morin said.

A new chapter in Maier’s life began in 1956 when she moved to Chicago’s North Shore to nanny for the Gensburg family. There, she was afforded a darkroom, where she processed her prints and developed her rolls of black-and-white film. Nevertheless, her most significant influence during this time was the children she looked after.

“If Vivian Maier would not have been a nanny—that means in constant contact with kids—maybe she would not have this huge power of imagination: playing, inventing, telling stories,” said Morin. Maier’s body of work—especially from 1956 to the 1970s—is defined by this childlike impulse. Her photos, whether capturing a poster of a woman sticking out her tongue or as an onlooker to a fight between a police officer and a woman, feel novel. Among the crowds of the city, she appears interested in everything and everyone, as if seeing it for the first time.

She often took the affluent children she cared for to poorer or industrial areas of Chicago to broaden their perspectives. She also photographed these environments, as in her 1963 photo of three children playing in concrete pipes. Her photos engage with often-overlooked elements of the urban environment, capturing moments as encountered by viewers. As Morin noted, “She had a tentacular way of embracing the world, picking up little narratives she found just in the street or wherever—little things.”

Self-portraits were a hallmark of Maier’s photography and comprise some of the most compelling works in “Unseen Work.” Her first portraits of herself, while still living in New York, depict her standing in a window or mirror. Later, in Chicago, she experimented with space and composition. Some works, like her 1956 untitled self-portrait, use a bathroom mirror to capture herself ad infinitum. “There are no other photographers that really dive so deep into how to represent themselves,” said Morin.

By turning the camera onto herself, her face often solemn, she contended with her own identity, also depicted through her shadow. In these portraits, it seems she is gradually putting together an idea of who she is. “Photography is like the title of Virginia Woolf’s book A Room of One’s Own, and it is [Maier’s] own room,” said Morin. “Photography is a place where she can build her identity, where she’s free, where she can invent when she has a personality outside of this little room, which is her photography, her language.”