Nanny for wealthy families in New York and Chicago since the early XNUMXs, for over five decades she has photographed life on the streets of the cities where she lived without ever making her work known. Never an exhibition, not even marginal, never a publication.
What he has left is an immense archive, with more than 150.000 negatives, a myriad of undeveloped films, prints, super 8 or 16 mm films, recordings, notes and other documents of various kinds that the "French" nanny (the mother was originally from the Provençal Alps) he accumulated in the rooms where he lived, guarding everything with great jealousy.
Finally confined to a warehouse, the material was confiscated in 2007, due to non-payment of the rent, and then discovered by the young John Maloof in a Chicago auction house.
The exhibition at the MAN in Nuoro, curated by Anne Morin, created in collaboration with diChroma Photography, will be Vivian Maier's first hosted by an Italian public institution.
Starting from the materials collected by John Maloof, the exhibition project provides an overview of Vivian Maier's activity, emphasizing key elements of her poetics, such as the obsession with documentation and accumulation, fundamental for the construction of a correct artistic profile, as well as a biographical one.
Together with 120 of the most important photographs from the Maloof archive, captured between the early 8s and the late XNUMXs, the exhibition also presents a series of ten super XNUMX films and a selection of color images taken from the mid of the sixties. Devoid of narrative texture and without camera movements, the videos shed light on his way of approaching the subject, providing useful clues for the interpretation of the photographic work.
The shots from the XNUMXs instead tell of the change of vision, dictated by the transition from the Rolleiflex to the Leica, which forced Vivian Maier to transfer the camera from belly to eye level, offering her new possibilities of vision and storytelling.
The exhibition will also be enriched by a series of contact sheets, never exhibited before, useful for understanding the processes of vision and development of the American photographer.
To captivate the public, even before the photographs, is the story of "nanny Vivian", perfect for an existential novel or as the plot of a bittersweet comedy; so unusual, so fascinating, that it doesn't seem real.
But beyond the story, beyond the biographical notes, the little big secrets revealed by the people who knew her, beyond her portrait of an eccentric and reserved woman, tough and curious like few others, guardian of a mystery not yet revealed, beyond all is the great photographic work of Vivian Maier, about which much remains to be said.
Vivian Maier has mostly shot in her spare time and judging by the results one can believe that, in that time, she did nothing else. Her favorite subjects have been streets and people, more rarely architectures, objects and landscapes.
She photographed what suddenly presented itself in front of her, whether it was strange, unusual, noteworthy, or the most common of everyday actions. Her world was "the others", the strangers, the anonymous people of the cities, with whom she came into contact for brief moments, always maintaining a certain distance which allowed her to make the subjects portrayed the unaware protagonists of small-large unimportant stories.
However, every now and then, in some more daring compositions, Vivian Maier made herself visible, crossed the threshold of the scene to become part of her story herself. The reflection of the face in a glass, the projection of the shadow on the ground, its silhouette appear in the perimeter of many images, almost always broken by shadows or reflections, with the somewhat obsessive insistence of someone who, together with an idea of the world, he is above all in search of himself. In this endless investigation she sometimes even involved the children who were entrusted to her, forcing them to follow her around the city, often in degraded areas of New York or Chicago. To a sensitive and benevolent gaze for the humble, the marginalized, she combined a sarcastic vein, evident in many stolen shots, which affected everyone a little, from the rich bourgeois of the uptown neighborhoods to the drifters of the suburbs.
“Vivian Maier – says Lorenzo Giusti, Director of MAN – is spoken of today as a great photographer of the twentieth century, to be compared to the masters of street reportage, from Alfred Eisenstaedt to Robert Frank, from Diane Arbus to Lisette Model. However, the large museums find it difficult to legitimize her work, both because she never had a single opportunity in her entire life to show it, and also because of the widespread - and legitimate - distrust of the "hobbyist" activity. But museums, as we know, always arrive a little late.
Of Vivian Maier's works, it is not only the observation skills, the watchful eye attentive to every sensitive variation of the whole, the ability to compose and frame that are striking. What impresses her most about her is her ease in passing from one register to another, from chronicle, to tragedy, to comedy of the absurd, always firmly holding faith in her own gaze. A voice that remained out of the choir for a long time, but undoubtedly well tuned”.
