A posthumous celebration of a genius 🤍
. For one, she was never known as a photographer to the little company she kept, not in her lifetime at least. Maier’s would-be day job – were it not for the fact she often combined it with a Rolleiflex camera around her neck – was a nanny. For over 40 years she looked after children between New York and Chicago, privately amassing a prolific body of work that was only uncovered as recently as 2007, two years before her death.
This exhibition dispels the mystery to reveal something more nuanced: that Maier, as an obsessive collector of stories – visual, written or aural – prioritised the capturing of a moment, not as a means to an end, but as an act of personal fulfilment in itself. As for her work as a nanny, the exhibition demonstrates how closely her daily engagement with children informed her photographic eye.
“It is no coincidence that Maier was a governess,” says Morin. “Her proximity to the world of children has probably allowed her to refine her view of the world, and to have the same ability as children to discover things. She had exceptional acuity and was able to see the extraordinary in the ordinary. She knew how to see what would usually go unnoticed, those little inflections of reality that are always on the verge of slipping away.
As for Maier’s enigmatic legacy, the exhibition prompts us to instead focus our attention on her superb feats in composition and timing rather than become fixated on the unyielding mystery of her character. “The closer one gets to the work of Vivian Maier, the more opaque she becomes as a person,” says Morin. “The work only reflects Vivian Maier as a character and it is difficult to establish her true personality. It is also a territory I prefer not to venture into.
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