“I am out with lanterns, looking for myself.” Those were the words of poet Emily Dickenson, but they could aptly describe Vivian Maier (1926-2009), one of the greatest street photographers of the 20^th century and certainly the most elusive. Working as a Chicago nanny, she photographed the visible world around her, amassing over 100,000 undiscovered images by the time of her death. 

Forografiska New York is a branch of the Swedish photography museum Fotografiska, located in Gramercy Park, Manhattan. The museum's home is the Church Missions House, a six-story, 45,000-square-foot Romanesque Revival landmark. It has recently mounted Unseen: Vivian Maier, a well-deserved major exhibition of this secretive artist with over 200 works on display. 

Admittedly, the only hope of trying to solve her identity or her obsessions is through the images themselves. For she continues to keep even the most persistent among us guessing.

Wandering the urban streets of New York City, then later in her adopted city of Chicago, her chosen subjects appear as anonymous as she attempted to make herself.  Ordinary, yes, banal, yes, but in lingering before the image, we can see as Maier did, something extraordinary.  At one point, she captures a well-dressed couple, the woman pinioned against a wall in a suggestive confrontation with her companion, while another pair of pedestrians pass by. It’s not unlike the decisive moments in which Henri Cartier-Bresson excelled.

In another, an elderly, downtrodden couple approach the camera, seemingly two lost souls in a foreign universe. There’s a Diane Arbus quality to their vulnerability, yet absent the bizarre fixations of so many Arbus images.

Maier wasn’t above injecting humor in her daily searches. A man sits with a squirming baby in Central Park, a balloon in hand totally obscuring his face. A second later and an errant breeze could have revealed the subject’s face. The photograph would have retained its charm perhaps, but with the balloon’s interference, the image Maier gives us is nothing short of a work of genius.

Subtle gestures could be just as important to Maier as faces, providing a moment of instant recognition for the viewer. A woman’s arm reaching down to adjust her high heel on a city street is as legitimate a subject as any other. Two women as subjects on a park bench become a play of patterns—the purse, jacket, checkered dress, and the striped border of the dress repeated in the bow tie result in an exercise in abstraction.

In her portraiture, she often photographed unassuming individuals, approaching them as the situation required with a minimum of words. But her objective was to avoid the “posed” look that could alter the honest portrayal she was seeking. Exceptions, such as the Lena Horne portrait, project a warm, friendly encounter with the photographer.

Examples of self-portraiture are as enigmatic as the subject herself. She often employs shadows as if to play hide-and-seek with the viewer. Perhaps the manipulation of her images could be interpreted as a search for her own identity.

Maier brought a special talent to her role as photographer in her interaction with children. For almost 40 years, working as a governess, a child’s perceptions and interactions with the world came as no surprise to her. The creative impulses of the young came into full play. With the click of her Roleiflex, she could bring to life the child in herself. The photographer as artist is visible in a stunning picture of a little boy peering through a vortex of fencing—a surreal funnel-like effect results.

Young subjects could be discovered anywhere she ventured. A sojourn abroad—the possible result of the sale of a family farm in France—provided more opportunities. A little girl in a tug-of-war with her caregiver is caught in the frame, still another suddenly overcome with tearful distress in public.

Maier’s mastery of black-and-white image-making speaks for itself, but her experimentation extended to some super-8 mm films as well. One such effort shows a collective rush of humanity going about their daily business in office garb—wide orange ties, brightly colored shirts and women’s mini-skirted suits from 60 odd years ago—a cultural lookback for today’s viewer. For Maier, it stands as a simple exercise as witness to her own times.

How, you might ask, did this voluminous collection, heretofore unseen, come to light? As she became destitute in old age, the Gensburg brothers, whom Maier had looked after as children, moved her to better lodgings in the Rogers Park area of Chicago. But two years before her death, unable to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago's North Side, all her negatives, prints, audio recordings and films were auctioned off.

Enter John Maloof, a Chicago collector who bought the largest part of Maier's work, about 30,000 negatives in all, because he was working on a book about one of the city’s colorful neighborhoods. Her name was in the boxes, but it wasn’t until a Google search unearthed a death notice in the Chicago Tribune that more information came to light.  When he shared some of his newly acquired images on the web, the samples went viral. She had suddenly become an online celebrity.

Maloof’s own obsession led to his film Finding Vivian Maier (2023), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was nominated for Best Documentary at the 87^th Academy Awards. Roberta Smith in the New York Times has compared Maier’s work to just about every well-known photographer you can think of, including Weegee, Robert Frank, and Richard Avedon. Yet, in Maier’s case, the images “maintain a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion."

The mystery of Vivian Maier the woman may never be solved.  But she left us-- through her eyes -- an irreplaceable vision of ourselves.

Author Bio:

Sandra Bertrand is Highbrow Magazine’s chief art critic.

For Highbrow Magazine

Images: Provided by Sandra Bertrand