The story of Vivian Maier (1926-2009) is splendidly peculiar. For 4 many years she labored as a nanny in New York and Chicago, throughout which era she secretly took lots of of hundreds of pictures. She was fiercely devoted and technically expert, but she shared her photos with just about nobody. “She was an ‘invisible’ lady,” says Anne Morin, the curator of the primary UK exhibition of Maier’s work, at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. “She by no means had her personal life, residing in the home of her employers, working for them. The one territory the place she may very well be free along with her personal id was images. This was her strategy to exist.”
It was maybe Maier’s anonymity that enabled her to seize so freely the on a regular basis expressions and interactions of individuals of various social standings. Produced by the cultural administration firm diChroma Pictures, which has organised a number of exhibits of her work, the exhibition will carry collectively greater than 130 black-and-white and color pictures, in addition to movie and audio.
“What’s fascinating is that her visible language by no means modified,” says Morin, who has been working with the Maier archive for greater than ten years, collaborating with worldwide establishments to carry her work to a wider viewers. “The pictures from the Nineteen Nineties are not any higher than those taken within the late Nineteen Forties. She established the specifics of her type at first, and inside that very same type she moved from one theme to a different and again once more.” Her topics vary from glamorous housewives to the homeless to architectural snapshots of bustling shopfronts and empty eating places. She took a number of self-portraits, too.
“She by no means had her personal life, residing in the home of her employers, working for them. The one territory the place she may very well be free along with her personal id was images. This was her strategy to exist.”
Anne Morin, curator
It was not till 2007, when Maier fell behind on the funds for a storage locker, that a few of her work turned public. At public sale, the property agent and novice historian John Maloof acquired a field of negatives, reams of undeveloped movie and different collectables. Captivated by the portraits of day by day city life, he tracked down the remainder of the containers and started his quest to carry Maier’s work to gentle. In 2009 he discovered a quick obituary on-line and, after placing collectively a images weblog and his personal exhibition (museums weren’t at this level), he made a documentary, Discovering Vivian Maier. After the movie’s launch, Maier turned a landmark determine in Twentieth-century American images (kicking off a prolonged authorized battle over management of her legacy).
Why? “Most likely as a result of tens of millions of individuals, for one purpose or one other, can relate to her,” Morin says. That, and the truth that “there’s no different related case within the historical past of images”. One of many self-portraits that may characteristic at MK Gallery distils Maier’s double life—her home work and her ardour for creativity—in a single snapshot. She leans ahead, resting one elbow on the deal with of a pram, the opposite on the aspect of a automobile, and factors her digital camera on the automobile’s wing mirror. The result’s a carefully cropped portrait of Maier and her two younger fees mirrored within the polished metallic, Maier’s face hidden behind the digital camera.
• Vivian Maier: Anthology, MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, 11 June-25 September
