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Jeu de Paume / Château de Tours

Vivian MaierNovember 9, 2013 – June 1, 2014A Photographic Revelation

Curator of the exhibitionAnne Morin, director of diChroma photography

PartnersExhibition produced by diChroma photography

in partnership with the Jeu de Paume and the Municipality of Tours,

aided by Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

The Jeu de Paume receives a subsidy from the Ministry of Culture and Communication.

It gratefully acknowledges support from Neuflize Vie, its global partner.

Media partnersA Nous, ARTE, Faribole, France Bleu Touraine

Vivian MaierNovember 9, 2013 – June 1, 2014A Photographic Revelation

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Vivian Maier, Chicago, Illinois, January 1956 © Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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The Exhibition

Vivian Maier (1926–2009) was the archetypal self-taught photographer with a keen sense of observation

and an eye for composition. She was born in New York, but spent part of her childhood in France before

returning to New York in 1951 when she started taking photos. In 1956, she moved to Chicago, where she

lived until her death in 2009.

Her talent is comparable with that of the major figures of American street photography such as Lisette

Model, Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus and Garry Winogrand. The exhibition presented at the Château de Tours

by the Jeu de Paume, in partnership with the Municipality of Tours and diChroma photography, is the

largest ever exhibition in France devoted to Vivian Maier. It includes 120 black and white and colour gelatin

silver prints from the original slides and negatives, as well as extracts from Super 8 films she made in the

60s and 70s. This project, which is sourced from John Maloof’s collection, with the valuable assistance of

Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York, reveals a poetic vision that is imbued with humanity.

John Maloof discovered Vivian Maier’s astonishing photos completely by chance in 2007 at an auction in Chicago.

At the time, this young collector was looking for historical documentation about a specific neighbourhood of the city

and he bought a sizeable lot of prints, negatives and slides (of which a major part had not even been developed) as

well as some Super 8 films by an unknown and enigmatic photographer, Vivian Maier (New York, 1926 – Chicago,

2009). By all accounts, Vivian Maier was a discreet person and somewhat of a loner. She took more than 120,000

photos over a period of thirty years and only showed this consequential body of work to a mere handful of people

during her lifetime.

Vivian Maier earned her living as a governess, but all her free time and every day off was spent walking through

the streets of New York, then later Chicago, with a camera slung around her neck (first of all box or folding cameras,

later a Leica) taking photos. The children she looked after describe her as a cultivated and open-minded woman,

generous but not very warm. Her images on the other hand bear witness to her curiosity for everyday life and the

attention she paid to those passers-by who caught her eye: facial features, bearing, outfits and fashion accessories

for the well-to-do and the telltale signs of poverty for those who were less fortunate.

While some photos are obviously furtively taken snapshots, others bear witness to a real encounter between the

photographer and her models, who are photographed face-on and from close up. Her photos of homeless people

and people living on the fringe of society demonstrate the depth of her empathy as she painted a somewhat

disturbing portrait of an America whose economic boom was leaving many by the wayside.

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Vivian Maier, Untitled, 1954 © Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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Vivian Maier remained totally unknown until her death in April 2009. She had been taken in by the Gensburgs, for

whom she had worked for almost seventeen years, and many of her possessions as well as her entire photographic

output had been placed in storage. It was seized and sold in 2007 to settle unpaid bills.

Her biography has now been reconstructed, at least in part, thanks to a wealth of research and interviews carried

out by John Maloof and Jeffrey Goldstein after the death of Vivian Maier. Jeffrey Goldstein is another collector who

purchased a large part of her work. According to official documents, Vivian Maier was of Austro-Hungarian and

French origin and her various trips to Europe, in particular to France (in the Alpine valley of Champsaur where she

spent part of her childhood) have been clearly identified and documented. However, the circumstances that led her

to take an interest in photography and her life as an artist remain veiled in mystery.

Photography seemed to be much more than a passion: her photographic activity was the result of a deeply felt

need, almost an obsession. Each time she changed employers and had to move house, all her boxes and boxes of

films (that she hadn’t had developed for want of money), as well as her archives comprising books and press cuttings

about various stories in the news, came along too.

Vivian Maier’s body of work highlights those seemingly insignificant details that she came across during her long

walks through the city streets: odd gestures, strange figures and graphic arrangements of figures in space. She also

produced a series of captivating self-portraits from her reflection in mirrors and shop windows.

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Vivian Maier, Self Portrait, June 1953 © Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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«

Vivian Maier1926 Vivian Maier was born in New York on 1 February.

Her father was of Austro-Hungarian origin and her mother (who was born in the Alps)

was French.

1930 Vivian’s father abandoned both mother and daughter, who moved into an apartment

with Jeanne Bertrand, a photographer.

1932 Vivian Maier and her mother moved to Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur in the Hautes-

Alpes department of France.

1938 They returned to New York.

1950 Vivian Maier visited France again to collect an inheritance from her great aunt; this

money would finance her future travels. She took many landscape photos of the

Champsaur valley and portraits of its inhabitants with either a box or folding camera.

1951 She went to Cuba, Canada and California.

To earn her living, Vivian Maier became a governess.

Around1952 She bought her first Rolleiflex. She took an interest in daily life around her in the

streets of New York. She also took portraits of the children she was looking after, as

well as complete strangers and the occasional celebrity she met by chance.

1955 Vivian Maier went to Los Angeles and worked there for a while.

1956 She settled in Chicago and began working for the Gensburgs. She stayed 17 years in

the family’s employment and set up a darkroom in her bathroom.

1959-1960 Vivian Maier did a round-the-world trip principally visiting the Philippines, Asia, India,

Yemen, the Middle East, Mediterranean Europe and France for the last time.

1970-1980 She took colour photos with her Leica and shot 8 mm and 16 mm films.

This period saw the end of Vivian Maier’s photographic activity.

1990-2000 She deposited her considerable collection of books, press cuttings, films and prints

in storage. All these possessions were seized several years later to settle unpaid rent.

She was more or less without work and her income was negligible.

The Gensburgs rented an apartment so she would have somewhere to live.

2009 Vivian Maier died in anonymity in Chicago on 21 April.

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Inventing Vivian Maier

By Abigail Solomon Godeau*The essay by Abigail Solomon-Godeau Inventing Vivian Maier is available on the Jeu de Paume’s

online magazine: http://lemagazine.jeudepaume.org

Thus, the recently excavated photographs, negatives, Super 8 films and videos made by Maier raise these questions and

more. [...] For most of her adult life, she worked as a nanny, governess or caregiver in the suburbs or towns around Chicago’s

North Shore (ca 1956-1980s). She seems to have discarded nothing she ever possessed; among her effects beside the

photographs were found clothing, shoes, old newspapers, books, albums, memorabilia, and – importantly – professional

darkroom processing receipts. She never cashed in her tax reimbursements, becoming effectively indigent by 2007. Thus,

and with respect to her now celebrated corpus, it was only when the contents of her storage lockers were auctioned off for

non-payment that the story of her discovery begins. [...]

While there exist hundreds, if not thousands of photographers, many anonymous, who have made pictures on the street

since photography’s earliest years (and for many different reasons and purposes), this does not in and of itself constitute

a coherent genre. As a term invented in the mid-twentieth century within art photography discourse, the notion of “street

photography” has been deployed to consecrate work by a very limited number of [mostly] art photographers (Walker

Evans, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Robert Frank are paradigmatic examples). Be that as it may, among the ranks of those

taking pictures of passers-by in public space, the number of women to have done this is significantly rare.1 [...] In any event,

despite her distance from photography as a métier, Maier’s life-long picture-taking, carried out primarily in public places,

was anything but the hobby of an amateur, despite its private motivation. To what extent this was a function of her asocial

existence, her extreme eccentricity, her apparent asexuality, who can say? Like so much else of Maier’s life and work, this

is not an answerable question. What one can say is that in some mysterious, and indeed poignant way, Maier lived her

adult life through the camera’s lens, a vicarious life in which the camera “eye” and the subjective “I” were inextricably linked. I

know of no such other example in the history of photography. But an important point to be made is that like photojournalism,

photographing on the street is a quintessentially masculine preserve. The reasons for this are many, and include the masculine

prerogatives of active looking, the gendered attributes of public space, the relative vulnerability of women within that space,

and the aggressive aspects of photographing unwitting subjects.

Accordingly, sexual difference, as well as gender — both inescapable facts of human psychic and social existence — cannot

be immaterial or irrelevant in Maier’s photographic practice. It may have determined how she photographed (the Rolleiflex

is far more discreet than a camera held to the eye); what she photographed (much of her subject matter is of suburban

children at play) and shaped the way she imaged herself as an isolated figure disconnected from other human beings. Be

that as it may, and in keeping with her employment, one major aspect of her work from the 1950s is the way she recorded

the life of children (her charges included) without sentimentality or condescension. Depicted in parks and schoolyards, her

* Abigail Solomon-Godeau is professor in the Department of Art History Art and Architecture, University of California, Santa Barbara.

«

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Vivian Maier, New York, New York State, no date © Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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[white] children in well-to-do suburbs of the North Shore are interestingly paralleled by her pictures of inner-city children of

colour and adults, as well as the working class, the poor, and the down-and-out. These raise interesting questions as to how

and why this Franco-American, spinsterish woman would be so drawn to the urban margins: voyeurism? curiosity? empathy?

identification?

Reference is made by some of her previous employers (notably the Gensburgs) to her espousal of “liberal” or “left-wing”

politics, but no real details are supplied. Moreover, photographing then Vice-President Richard Nixon greeting crowds

in Chicago or newspaper headlines about John and later Robert Kennedy’s assassination are not indications of any

particular political orientation. Apparently, there exist many photographs made during her extensive international travels,

which included South Asia, the Philippines, Cuba, Egypt and many other places, but few of these have been published or

exhibited. If nothing else, these far-flung voyages during which, as always, she photographed constantly, suggest that she

was utterly fearless. (In the 1950s, few women alone would have hazarded such journeys just as they would have avoided

the Bowery or Chicago slums).[...]

Of what has thus far been seen of Maier’s pictures, there appear to be few pictures of beautiful women or handsome men

(there are some exceptions, but they are exceptions, unless this itself reflects editorial choices). On the other hand, there are

many pictures of unconscious subjects (as well as unwitting ones), many back views, and many fragments of bodies. This

suggests a gendered position inasmuch as it takes certain assertiveness, if not aggression, to photograph people without

their permission. The expression of affront or annoyance on the face of certain of the bourgeois elderly women in Maier’s

pictures makes evident their displeasure at being so taken, as it were, off guard. One of the camera shop employees where

Maier processed her film remarks that she didn’t like women who were “made-up,” or “too feminine.” Thus, while certain of

her photographic subjects can be said to be participating in a social transaction, there are also numerous instances of what

Henri Cartier-Bresson characterized as the camera’s “pounce”.

Here we might distinguish between her self-portraits and her self-representation, for while all portraits are self-representations,

not all self-representations are portraits. Specifically, I refer here to the many photographs in which her unmistakable shadow

looms across the scene before her viewfinder. This is, as is well known, a recurring trope in modernist photography; indeed,

Lee Friedlander produced an entire book around this device. Which in turn suggests that Maier had been much more

aware of the photography of her contemporaries than is acknowledged. Among her archives are a number of photography

books, and during her many visits to NYC, she could well have popped into MoMA, where photography was continually

exhibited. Perhaps the assumption of her unfamiliarity with contemporary work, even ignorance of it, is thought to burnish her

reputation further. As for the self-portraits, it is their implacable opacity, and occasionally striking formal invention that place

them into a different category than the more conventional imagery she made in the street.[...] “Her big project”. remarks

Michael Williams, “was her life,” but perhaps the even larger project is her posthumous invention.

1. Until the 1920s, itinerant and studio photographers were invariably men. By the 1930s, there were a few women photographers working in public space (e.g., Ilse Bing, Germaine Krull and Marianne Breslauer in Paris), and in the US, several women were hired by the WPA and FSA or employed as magazine photographers (e.g., Esther Bubley, Dorothea Lange, Marion Post Wolcott, Margaret Bourke-White). Nevertheless, even now very few women photographers take urban streets as their purview, while any number of men (e.g., Garry Winogrand, Joel Meyerowitz, Beat Streuli, Philip-Lorca diCorcia) have made their reputations as art photographers with this type of photography.

»

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Vivian Maier, Florida, 9 January 1957 © Vivian Maier / Maloof Collection. Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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Press visualsConditions of UseThe images in the following section can be reproduced free of charge solely in the context of the promotion of the

exhibition and only for its duration. Publication on websites must not exceed 72 DPI.

VM 01Vivian Maier Untitled, 1960© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 02Vivian MaierSt. East no108, New York, New York State, 28 September 1959© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 03Vivian MaierUntitled, 1954© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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VM 04Vivian MaierSelf Portrait, February 1955© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 05Vivian MaierUntitled, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 06Vivian MaierUntitled, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 07Vivian MaierUntitled, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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VM 08Vivian MaierNew York, New York State, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 09Vivian MaierChicago, Illinois, January 1956© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 10Vivian MaierChicago, Illinois, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 11Vivian Maier New York, New York State, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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VM 12Vivian MaierFlorida, 9 January 1957© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 13Vivian MaierUntitled, 3 September 1954© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 14Vivian MaierSelf Portrait, June 1953© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 15Vivian MaierSelf Portrait, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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VM 16Vivian MaierSelf Portrait, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 17Vivian MaierNew York, New York State, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 18Vivian MaierUntitled, no date© Vivian Maier / Maloof CollectionCourtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

VM 19Vivian MaierUntitled, Chicago, Illinois, August 1976© Vivian Maier/Maloof Collection, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

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InformationChâteau de ToursAdress

25, avenue André Malraux

37000 Tours - France

www.tours.fr

Openinghours

Tuesday to Friday: 2pm–6pm

Saturday and Sunday: 3pm–6pm

Free entry

Guidedtours

Saturday: 3pm

Jeu de PaumeAddress

1, place de la Concorde

75008 Paris - France

Information: +33 (0)1 47 03 12 50

www.jeudepaume.org

Press visualsVisuals to be downloaded on the website www.jeudepaume.org

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ContactsPressRelationsJeudePaume:AnnabelleFloriant

+33 (0)1 47 03 13 22 / +33 (0)6 42 53 04 07 / annabellefloriant@jeudepaume.org

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+33 (0)2 47 21 64 33 / m.ayral@ville-tours.fr

CommunicationJeudePaume:AnneRacine

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