Vivian Maier was a disappearance artist. Street photographers typically keep hidden when shooting, but Maier receded in every aspect of her life. Her now well-known story, which has contributed greatly to her posthumous fame, is that while she supported herself through employment as a nanny, her true vocation was photography. She worked primarily in black-and-white with a square-format Rolleiflex, the same camera used by many of the greats, including Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon and Bill Brandt.
Her photographs entered the public realm in 2007, when John Maloof, then a real-estate agent with a passion for Chicago history, bought the contents of her unpaid storage locker. After examining the contents, he located other boxes, eventually amassing more than 100,000 negatives and slides, as well as about 3,000 prints. He has dedicated himself to promoting her legacy, and co-directed an Oscar-nominated documentary film, “Finding Vivian Maier” (2014). Maier, who died in 2009, at 83, never met the man who would establish her reputation.
“Vivian Maier: Unseen Work,” at Fotografiska until Sept. 29, is the first New York museum show devoted to Maier and one of the largest exhibitions ever mounted of her photographs. Organized by Anne Morin, director of diChroma Photography, it was first seen in a different iteration at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in 2021. Thematically arranged and attractively installed, with more than 200 works (including color photos taken with a Leica, Super 8 films and audio recordings), it offers an unusual opportunity to assess Maier’s achievement.
The color photographs are mostly less interesting than the black-and-white ones. The films are completely unremarkable. But in the photos she made with the Rolleiflex, the acuteness of her eye is undeniable. Again and again, Maier captures a compelling detail, an unusual face, a scene of striking visual interest. She also has a flair for composition. But does that mean, as the wall label proclaims, that she “belongs alongside some of the greatest names in photographic history, such as Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Berenice Abbott, and Henri Cartier-Bresson”?
Walking through this exhibition, I thought continually of those artists — and many others. Her shadowed self-portraits recall Lee Friedlander, as does a scene of city pedestrians that is divided by a vertical post, half seen in reflection and half viewed directly. Garry Winogrand came to mind when I gazed at an amusing shot of two men quizzically bent over a serpent-like hose, and a marvelous picture of a couple strolling nonchalantly past a man and woman in a heated confrontation. Two old women wearing peculiar hats and seated on a park bench might have been taken by Arbus. A picture of two girls in front of a wall chalked with a stick drawing of a child evokes Cartier-Bresson. Mannequins in a shop window reprises a Surrealist subject that, long before Maier, was explored by Eugène Atget and Man Ray.
A few of these artists Maier preceded; how well she knew the work of the others is impossible to determine. That, however, is beside the point. The question is not whether Maier was derivative of others, but who she was herself. An artist uses a camera as a tool of self-expression. Maier was a supremely gifted chameleon. After immersing myself in her work, other than detecting a certain wryness, I could not get much sense of her sensibility.
Her self-portraits may be her most intriguing work. Often, she used mirrors in a way that seems to address the absence of an integrated personality. In an exceptional self-portrait, taken in New York in 1955, she looks into the shop window of a looking-glass store; one circular mirror captures her face and hat, while another reflects her hands holding the Rollei. She used reflections as well in a self-portrait taken the next year, positioning herself looking up between two mirrors that repeat her image infinitely.
A disembodied eye is one way to think of Maier — and, again, it is a subject she investigated. One of the revelations for me in this exhibition was a group of photographs in which Maier depicted such an eye. Several of them show a child, no doubt one of her charges, peeking out through a gap in the webbing of a lawn chair or, in one instance, through a hole in a piece of stained, corroded wood.
Maier only occasionally had access to a darkroom. A few juxtapositions in the show illustrate how she cropped a full-frame square negative to home in on what had attracted her to the subject. The quality of her lifetime prints is inferior to those made recently by the estate, but her elimination of extraneous elements improves the pictures. The custodians of her legacy can’t make such revisions on their own, leading us to wonder how she might have used the opportunity to edit her work carefully.
That is one of the many unanswered riddles in the Maier mystery. Artists who were unrecognized in their lifetimes are always intriguing, and photographers especially so, as their work can document aspects of a shadowy existence and leave behind tantalizing clues. In 2020, Gonzalo Reyes Rodriguez, an artist born in Mexico City and based in Vancouver, found a box of photos in Mexico City taken by a young man who, judging from the pictures, was — like Reyes Rodriguez — gay. Recently, a solo exhibition at David Peter Francis and a group show at Luhring Augustine displayed how Reyes Rodriguez incorporates some of those photographs into his own pieces, connecting the life of this unknown man to his own. Rather than seek the identity of the phantom photographer, he revels in the obscurity that allows him space to dream.
But no one is claiming greatness for the anonymous Mexico City photographer. The paradox of Vivian Maier is that the lifetime of anonymity that has captured the public imagination persists in the work. There is no way to infer from the photographs her temperament or her outlook on the world, despite her range. She didn’t advance the medium of photography by contributing anything uniquely her own. That is the difference between a highly talented photographer and a great artist.
Who was Vivian Maier? Poignantly, her best and most original photographs are the self-portraits in which she is seeking to make sense of who she is, arranging fragments that never come together.