The assessment of her work has remained fairly consistent. 'The images are wonderful, with a keen but unvarnished empathy for their subjects, who include children, women, the indigent and the elderly. Similarly, she rarely took more than one shot of a scene. The variety of images suggests a consuming curiosity the lack of prints an almost unfathomable sureness in her own vision. She said, 'These two exhibitions nominate a new candidate for the pantheon of great 20th-century street photographers: Vivian Maier (1926-2009), who worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago, took pictures incessantly, printed only a few of the more than 100,000 negatives she amassed, and never published or exhibited her work.

… Ironically, as old as Maier's pictures are, few feel as nostalgic or as dated as the most contemporary Instagrams on your cellphone.'Įarlier that year, Roberta Smith, wrote in The New York Times about two 2012 shows of Maier’s work. 'Portrait-chronicles,' Susan Sontag called them. The contact sheets that ring the History Museum show, the part of the exhibit visitors linger over longest, seem like ancestors of the random shots stacking up on iPhones and Flickr accounts, seemingly unbroken documents of what a person with a camera runs across. 24, 2012, Chicago Tribune about a show at the Chicago History Museum, said “many of us have been so taken with the story of these old photos we never noticed how new the work feels, how Maier's photography, seemingly casual and certainly obsessive, presaged photography in the digital age.

Yet she made thousands and thousands of photographs obsessively, and created a very interesting body of work’.”Ĭhristopher Borrelli writing in the Sept.

‘She could be the new discovery,’ he says, but ‘there’s no one iconic image at the moment.’ Howard Greenberg, who will show her work at his New York gallery from December 15 through January 28, says, ‘I’m taken by the idea of a woman who as a photographer was completely in self-imposed exile from the photography world. Steven Kasher, a New York gallerist planning a Maier exhibition this winter, says she has the skill ‘of an inborn melodist.’ John Bennette, who curated a Maier exhibition on view at the Hearst Gallery in New York City, is more guarded.

Here, the International Photography Hall of Fame and Museum is a partner in presenting the film.ĭavid Zax, writing in the December 2011 “Smithsonian” said, “Current professional opinion is mixed. The quality of her work has sustained it. Her story piqued the interest of the art world. She also took thousands of photographs that were never published and only discovered fairly recently. 25 at the Plaza Frontenac Cinema, tells the story of a woman who worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago. “ Finding Vivian Maier,” a documentary opening Feb.

Vivian maier photos for sale