Spread over two floors in the Fotografiska building in New York’s Flatiron District, the exhibition Vivian Maier: Unseen Work (which runs through September 29) reveals a trove of surprises. The late, great street photographer was also an evocative portraitist: Maier, a notorious loner, liked to click with people. The urban documentarian of humdrum life had a knack for humor and an eye for drama.

“The scenes she photographed are often anecdotes, coincidences, lapses of reality, the residual moments of life to which no one pays attention,” notes Anne Morin, director of DiChroma Photography in Madrid and the curator of the show. “Each of her images are situated in a place where the ordinary sheds its skin and becomes extraordinary.”

Unknown Legends

The Maier scenes range widely: from newspaper headlines peeking out from piles of debris to abstracted closeups of found objects; from candid surprised faces to random odd shots of homeless people sleeping on benches. Her Super 8 films explore waves of Chicago pedestrians, a detached swarm of humanity. 

As the largest Maier retrospective yet shown in America, Unseen Work bears earmarks of completism. “Some of the newest images are quite aesthetic—but many leave you wondering the intentions,” opined the Phoblographer. “They leave me wondering why these images needed to be in a museum in the first place.”

By all indications, Maier’s photographs were not intended for museum walls. In her career as a nanny, she obsessively chronicled her life and times, but rarely shared her images with others—or even developed them into prints. Her pack-rat mentality preserved the negatives, hundreds of thousands of them stowed in boxes until the end of Maier’s life (at age 83) in 2009.

It was only afterward—when photo collectors including John Maloff and Jeff Goldstein brought her work into the art world, chronicled in Maloff’s fascinating 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier—that she became a photography star.

Lights Out

And Fotografiska New York is no ordinary museum. Founded in 2019 as a stateside installment in a global cadre of photography venues—in cities including Berlin, Stockholm, Tallinn, and Shanghai—the Manhattan locale has sported six floors of exhibition space and launched some 49 ambitious and far-ranging displays, from the eccentric to the mainstream. (Showing concurrently with Maier: Brooklyn street photographer Bruce Gilden and a bevy of People magazine’s iconic portraits.) 

Fotografiska has been one of the few U.S. museums devoted to photography with the space and vision for shows usually found overseas in places like Madrid’s PhotoEspaña or Arles’s Les Rencontres de la Photographie. Sadly, having survived Covid, Fotografiska New York will close its doors on September 29, at the end of its exhibitions on Maier and Gilden. While tight-lipped about the future, the museum, a for-profit business, claims it will relocate somewhere in Manhattan with a broader floorspace.

“We’ve been having ongoing challenges with regard to the exhibition spaces,” executive director Sophie Wright told the New York Times about the move—which happens as the building changes owners. “The verticality of that building is not easy to manage. Our audience has been given a bumpy experience.” 

Fotografiska hopes to announce a new temporary home soon. (Yet one can’t help thinking of restaurants closing “for renovation” and wondering whether they’ll ever reopen.) It’s somehow fitting that this venue’s swan song is a vast survey of a lonesome photographer who was unknown in her lifetime, rediscovered in the internet era, and somehow became emblematic of how we see one another in the world now.

The Art of the Selfie

According to the 2021 biography Vivian Maier Developed, by genealogist Ann Marks—which meticulously traces the artist’s life, with help from photo archives in the John Maloof Collection—Maier took up photography in earnest in her mid-20s after buying a top-viewing Rolleiflex camera. “It was designed to be held at the waist, facilitating inconspicuous picture taking,” Marks notes. “With its square format, there was no need to shift from horizontal to vertical positioning. … Soon she began to compose self-portraits while cradling her camera, presenting herself as a serious photographer.”

The reclusive Maier, who routinely hid her past and inner identity from people she met, had an affinity for selfies and left behind hundreds of them. “Vivian Maier is such a big phenomenon nowadays because this problem of [the] self-portrait resonates with the selfie culture we see today,” curator Morin told artsy.net. “All that crisis of identity we are viewing on social media, with tons of selfies, finds an echo in the work of Maier. Perhaps 30 years ago, she would not have been so famous or so interesting because the selfie was not so important at that time.”

Maier’s artful self-portraits, ranging from geometric mirror shots to peekaboo shadows, seem to reflect her evolving artistic personae: the confident young New Yorker who held professional photography aspirations; the adventurous, self-sufficient world traveler; the contented nanny in the Chicago suburbs who took her charges on photo trips around the city; and, later, the oft-uprooted worker who struck a lone pose against scenes of desolation and decay.

The Kids are Alright

Throughout her adult life, Maier worked as a nanny to support her creative calling as a photographer. Her stints of employment, and relationships with families who hired her, varied widely. (One gig with talk-show host Phil Donahue lasted just a few months.) By all accounts, she was most comfortable during the 11 years she spent with the Gensburg family in the Chicago suburb of Highland Park, Illinois.

“She was like a real, live Mary Poppins,” Lane Gensburg later said of Maier. (However, Marks notes that Maier, a serious film buff, “wholeheartedly despised” the movie about the fictional nanny: “Her angry notes describe it as ‘outdated,’ ‘a real fiasco.’ and portraying a servant-child type of relationship.”)

In her years with the Gensburgs (1956–67), Maier bonded with the three brothers while documenting both their suburban lives and the cultural mosaic of the nearby Windy City. She left the family when the boys grew up but remained friendly. She never again found such a great fit.

Four decades later, at the end of her life, the Gensburg brothers helped Maier secure an apartment and then, after a head injury caused by a sidewalk fall, a live-in care facility. By then destitute, demented, and very delinquent on payments to a storage-locker company, Vivian Maier lost most of her possessions when the company auctioned them off. 

Photo collectors John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein were among several bidders who claimed her photographs, negatives, and undeveloped film rolls (amid voluminous boxes of newspapers, books, broken cameras, and bric-a-brac, most of which was tossed or donated).

Maier never recovered from the fall. When she passed away in 2009, the Gensburgs held a memorial and published an obituary, which helped Maloof track down and identify the mysterious photographer whose images were, after appearing on Flickr and eBay, going viral and selling like pricey hotcakes in cyberspace.

Isolation and Empathy

Part of the paradox of Maier’s life and work is the disconnect between them. What the Gensburgs—or any of her employers—didn’t know about was her tangled family background, which she kept under wraps. She had her reasons: “She clearly concluded that no one would want to learn their nanny had an unstable, narcissistic mother; a violent, alcoholic father; and a drug-addicted, schizophrenic brother,” Marks explains. “It can safely be assumed that Vivian did not have DNA on her side.” 

Long estranged from her nuclear family, Maier battled demons of her own: a severe and debilitating hoarding habit; and a condition that in Marks’ account, posthumously, experts term a “schizoid disorder.” The former wreaked plenty of havoc in Maier’s life, but also compelled her to preserve her trove of unpublished images. The latter strained her human interactions, yet may well have intensified her work. 

Maier possessed a drive to document all her movements in the world, yet lacked any sense of follow-through in sharing them. She shunned close human contact (no hugs!) but found fascination in people she witnessed. She was detached enough to invade her subjects’ privacy, yet connected enough to see their lives. She expressed her inner self in outward reflections. She was of the last century, but it could’ve been ours.

Unlikely Legacy

After it was discovered by the art world, Maier’s body of work set off a feeding frenzy among collectors, curators, fellow photographers, critics, historians, photo aficionados … and capitalist venturers. With no direct heirs, the contents of her estate sparked disputes, lawsuits, and deal-making, with John Maloof emerging as the owner of the lion’s share of the archive and New York’s Howard Greenberg Gallery as its U.S. rep. The work found its way to walls in dozens of museums around the world before landing at Fotografiska.

Who knows what Maier would say about all this? “Nothing is meant to last forever,” she once told an employer. “You have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end, and then someone else has the same opportunity.” 

Through September 29, this body of work sits in a grand photo-exhibition venue that will soon be shuttered. Through the magic of the camera, reflections from the eyes of Vivian Maier have attained a sort of permanence.

Featured images by Vivian Maier at Fotografiska: Chicago, Illinois, May 16, 1957; Self-portrait, New York, New York, 1953. Photos: © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy John Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.