Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926 to a father of Austro-Hungarian descent and a French mother. Around the age of four, Maier's father left the family and she remained in her mother's care, living alternately in the United States, and in the French alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur where her mother's extended family resided. The Maiers spent some of their time in the United States living with Jeanne Bertrand, a French-born professional portrait photographer, and sculptor. Records suggest that Maier and her mother lived with Bertrand in both Boston and the Bronx, New York. Maier began working as a nanny in 1951, first in New York and then in Chicago, where she continued to work until the 1990s.

Vivian Maier, Chicago, IL, c. 1976, gelatin silver print, 30 x 40 cm, © Estate Vivian Maier, Courtesy John Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

During her downtime as a nanny, she would often explore the urban landscapes capturing everyday scenes from life. The primary subject of her work is street scenes – particularly in working-class neighborhoods. Through an array of portraits depicting unknown figures with whom she could identify, Maier succeeds in capturing a gesture, an expression, a situation, and the grace of small, accessible things. Her earlier years remained faithful to a monochromatic documentary style but, she later adopted color which widened the scope of her oeuvre to allow for an element of symbolism. She also produced a number of self-portraits (black-and-white and color) that have given the world a picture of an otherwise unknown, intensely private figure.

Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait, New York, NY, 1953, gelatin silver print, 40 x 50 cm, © Estate Vivian Maier, Courtesy John Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

It appears that Maier was self-taught, drawing insights into photographic practice from images she saw at the exhibitions she frequented, by photographers like Brassaï and Henri Cartier-Bresson. By 1943, Maier (then aged seventeen) was no longer living with her mother, and was residing with a married couple who fostered children in Jackson Heights, Queens, named John and Berthe Lindenberger. When John passed away, Maier stayed on for some time with Berthe. She took on a second job, working at the Madame Alexander Doll Factory. Later in the decade, Maier returned to France where she began practicing photography using a Kodak Brownie camera with 6x9 film format, and no option for adjusting shutter speed, focus, or aperture. It would not be long, however, before she would switch to using an expensive Rolleiflex with square format film. In the 1960s, following her initial work in black and white, she turned to the musical harmonies of color, playing with the specificities of this new technique to introduce variations on her photographic theme.

Vivian Maier, Chicago, IL, August 1960, gelatin silver print, 40 x 50 cm, © Estate Vivian Maier, Courtesy John Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY

She also tried her hand at motion pictures, by means of a Super 8 or 16 mm camera, as though attempting to slow the pace of time and attune it to the rhythm of her gaze. What she filmed were not scenes but the movements of that gaze in space, constantly on the lookout for the next photographic image. At the core of the themes she explored, however, a crucial quest was at stake, which was to underpin the framework of her entire oeuvre: the quest for her own identity through self-portraits. This obsession with self-representation echoes a tradition that is unique to women photographers and dates back to the inception of the medium —to Maier, photography was precisely that haven of freedom, allowing her to touch upon an identity that had always been denied to her. Today she stands alongside the greatest icons of the 20th century in the history of photography. Not only has she become an emblem for women but for all the “invisible” people who see themselves in her.