Vivian Maier: In Her Own Hands

This exhibition brings together more than 80 photographs, most of them unpublished, of this American photographer who has managed to captivate the world after the chance discovery of her files, shortly before her death. In 2007, a young researcher in the history of Chicago, John Maloof, bought at a small neighbourhood auction some abandoned belongings of a totally unknown elderly woman named Vivian Maier. What no one could imagine was that her wardrobe harboured a huge photographic work: more than 120,000 negatives, home movies and sound recordings that would change the history of photography.

The exhibition “Vivian Maier. In Her Own Hands”, produced by diChroma Photography and curated by Anne Morin, brings together photographs in both black and white and colour, most of whom were recently revealed by the Maloof archive, showing street scenes from New York and Chicago over the years 1950 to 1980. The photographic language that Maier uses is its own visual experience based on a discrete and silent observation of the world around her. Her scenes spontaneously capture the peculiarities of the “urban America” ​​in the second half of the twentieth century with a great sense of composition, light and environment, showing a great ability to communicate both humour and tragedy. Vivian Maier’s work has already been inscribed in the history of twentieth-century photography, next to big names from the called Street Photography, as Helen Levitt, William Klein and Garry Winogrand. Vivian Maier (1926 – 2009) Born in New York to a French mother and an Austro-Hungarian father, worked as a nanny for forty years. On his days off Maier was dedicated to making photographs that will jealously hid to the eyes of others. Her life is a mystery. It is said to have died in abject poverty living on the streets for some time, until the children who had looked after in the late 1950s bought an apartment and paid her bills until the day of her death in 2009.