Image: Fotografiska Tallinn
The exhibition 'Vivian Maier: avastatud teosed' presents nearly 200 works spanning the early 1950s through the mid-1980s. The presentation includes vintage and contemporary photographic prints, colour and black-and-white photographs, Super 8 films, sound recordings and contact sheets added specifically for the Tallinn exhibition. Among the identified works are 'Vivian Maier. Chicago, IL, 1957' and 'Vivian Maier. New York, NY, 1954.'
Maier was born in New York’s Bronx and spent part of her childhood in France before returning to the United States in 1951. While living and working as a nanny in New York, she photographed the everyday life around her as an amateur and developed her visual language through the camera lens.
The exhibition presents Maier as a quiet witness to the American working class during the height of the American dream, a position in which she remained largely invisible. Its account describes her archive as a compelling record of postwar America and of the darker side of the American dream, noting that it took a long time for her work to come to light and be more widely discovered.
Maier continued photographing until the late 1990s and left an archive comprising more than 120,000 negatives. Her commitment to documenting the world also extended to home-made documentary films and sound recordings. In 2007, one of her storage units in Chicago was sold through a local auction house because of debts, and a huge number of negatives accumulated over her lifetime were found there. The discovery later affected the entire photography world and permanently changed the life of John Maloof, who brought Maier’s work to public attention.
Anne Morin, director of the photography platform diChroma photography and curator of the exhibition, characterizes the discovery of Maier’s photographs after her death as “one of the greatest fortunate accidents in the history of photography.”
