This Mary Poppins Came Armed with a Camera

A Vivian Maier show, New York’s first, and looking at People at 50

I was a man on a mission when I visited Fotografiska to see Vivian Maier: Unseen Work, the survey of photographs by the off-the-wall nanny whose life’s work, thoroughly unknown, was discovered in a storage unit in 2007. Maier (1926–2009), her work published and touted, is now considered a virtuosa, ranked with Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, and Wegee — some of the best, most trenchant street photographers of our era.

I’d never seen a critical mass of Maier’s photographs. And I’d never been to Fotografiska, a for-profit art space for contemporary photography that’s also a bar, coffee shop, bookshop, and music venue on 22nd Street and Park Avenue South in New York. Fotografiska is Swedish, with hotspots in Stockholm, London, Berlin, Shanghai, and Estonia’s Tallinn, now a hip hub. Unseen Work is the first Maier museum exhibition in New York. That’s surprising, since her eye is for city life.

The museum calls her “one of the greatest photographers of the 20th century.” Is Maier that good? No, I suspect. And Fotografiska? I loved it. It’s fresh and fun, and I felt fresh and fun after my most enjoyable visit. Unseen Work is a big exhibition, about 230 works, but it’s sensitively arranged in small galleries organized by themes that feel bite-sized. Sections on Maier’s self-portraits as well as photos — of everyday people in oddball moments, of quirky, hard-boiled faces, of subtle gestures, and of children —smoothly tell us how various she was. Her photographs are riveting, less for her vision, compelling and inimitable around the edges, than for her subjects. Life’s weird. People are weird.

So much of Maier’s draw is biographical, notable for the unusual discovery of her work around the time she was drifting toward the land of the non compos and about to die poor. Let’s get her trajectory out of the way. She was born in the Bronx to a French mother and an Austrian father who was in and out of the picture, both immigrants. As a young child, Maier and her mother moved to France. In 1951, Maier returned, getting a job as a live-in nanny. In 1956 she moved to Chicago, again to work as a nanny. She served at least three families, among them that of the  TV talk-show host Phil Donahue. To at least one family, she was much loved and loving, a Mary Poppins pushing children to consider worlds outside their suburban, haut bourgeois bubble.

As far as we know, her photography evolved from a hobby in the early 1950s to a passion. By the early ’90s, she had taken well over 100,000 pictures and had developed a roving eye that instinctively knew when to snap the camera that she nearly always hid but kept at the ready. Maier rarely seems to have asked subjects to pose. She’s never in your face. She had off-and-on access to a darkroom but printed almost no photographs.

By the mid ’70s, Maier started moving from family to family. Undeveloped, boxed negatives started to accumulate. By the ’90s, she’d rented a storage unit. Financially pressed, she stopped paying the unit’s monthly rent. At one point, she was homeless. In 2007 and 2008, the owner of the storage facility auctioned her things. John Maloof, a young Chicago real-estate agent, amateur historian, and connoisseur of flea markets bought boxes containing her negatives, as did others.

Who knows how surprised he was. He revealed Maier’s work to the public, starting on the internet, made a documentary about Maier for which he was nominated for an Oscar, and is her unofficial, undoubtedly ace curator. I’ll leave the Maier market for someone else to cover. I know that Maloof was involved in planning Unseen Work, as was Howard Greenberg Gallery, which represents the Maier estate. Yes, it’s rare for a prolific, first-rate, and utterly clandestine artist to be unearthed as she was.

What’s ingenious about her work? I love her self-portraits. I’d call her self-involved, as are most loners and outsiders. Maier is indeed among Maier’s favorite subjects. The exhibition begins with a group of them. She’s a spinster-handsome woman and looks like Miss Hathaway from The Beverly Hillbillies. We see her reflected in a mirror over and over, or through a door’s frosted glass. The museum made a photograph of her shadow into a big wall mural. Talk about a ghostly presence. One abstract self-portrait shows her eye — just one — peering through the webbing of a lawn chair.

It’s as if she considers herself an optical illusion. “Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever,” she’s quoted in Maloof’s website devoted to her. “It’s a wheel,” referring to human life. “You get on, you have to go to the end, then someone has the same opportunity” — an odd thing to say, but it makes sense. She’s a diarist but also a disappearing act. She would have made a very good spy. I can’t fully explain taking more than 100,000 photographs and then simply filing them away. Maier seems to have found what she wanted in the acquisition of a moment and not in the tangible, visible print.

Maier’s certainly not a one-trick pony. The exhibition is divided into ten or so sections, but I looked at the portfolios Maloof has assembled. She photographed dozens of types of subjects. I saw photographs — in quantity — of lowbrow architecture, storefront signs, movie premieres, shoes, sweeping cityscapes and landscapes, people seen from behind, trashed newspapers, cats in all poses, including a dead cat.

Maier’s got film noir edge and an eye for scenes bound for the police blotter. Accidents, men dragged to the pokey, and drunks abound, as do the disfigured. And Maier never pushes the point. Unlike Diane Arbus, she doesn’t do extreme freaks. She’s a master of the moment, often catching normal people looking abnormal.

Maier’s day job was children. She had high standards, didn’t keep her opinions to herself, and wasn’t into baby talk, I’m sure. She liked her children, but she wasn’t their mother. One of her charges said she was sadistic, but I doubt that’s true. One adult’s tales of childhood abuse is another, older adult’s admonition to “wash your hands before dinner.” The boys whom she knew the longest, when they were adults and heard she was homeless, paid for her rent in a new apartment. Maier is very good at finding what’s feral or awkward in children and likes their natural curiosity. Mary Cassatt, she isn’t. Maier doesn’t do warm and fuzzy.

Baby-blue, Egyptian-blue, tan, and tangelo orange walls alternate in the gallery. The total look is dapper. In the ’60s, Maier photographed more and more in color. She’s got Vuillard’s eye for pattern. Many of the color photographs are scenes where the palette is mostly not black and white but close to it – grisaille is a good description — with one or two blocks of bright color, often red, green, or yellow. I wish there were more, but Unseen Work is a survey.

A couple of her short videos are on view. I liked the clip, about 30 seconds, showing workers walking with that quick morning gait we use as we head to the office. An overlarge woman wears a miniskirt that doesn’t suit her as she walks briskly. We see her from behind. She looks like a wobbly zeppelin.

Maier is part of a substantial group of very good American street photographers. They’re American flâneurs and uniquely American. We’re less about tradition and history and more about now. Americans are also extraordinarily curious and prize candor over being cryptic. Europeans, bound by class and castes, don’t naturally warm to street photography. They’re programmed to look straight ahead or, if Austrian or German, to look down.

I don’t think we’ve seen enough of Maier’s work to say she’s a great artist, as the exhibition claims. Her boosters have more than 100,000 negatives from which to pick. We don’t know much about what Maier would have picked for public consumption, or how she would have cropped scenes, though Unseen Work looks a bit at this.

I’d also like to know more about how artists see her photography, young artists especially. There’s much still to be excavated. I’d also like to see an exhibition on the French side of Maier. I suspect we’d see her as both very American and very French. Unseen Work is a success on many fronts, one of which is that it leaves us wanting more.

There’s a small but darling, nostalgic exhibition on the top floor of Fotografiska on the photography of People, the magazine that’s 50 years old. I never subscribed, but I’m not too shy to say it was my magazine of choice if I found it in a waiting room. “What interests people is other people,” one of its founders said when he proposed it. That nicely aligns the exhibition with the Maier show.

People: Celebrating Fifty Years is captivating, too. The magazine’s staple is the famous and the glamorous, but People covered 9/11, too, and there’s a section on that issue alone, 87 pages with work by 24 photographers. As the wretched, heart-wrenching day unfolded, the editor of the Manhattan-based magazine sent more and more photographers into the vortex. Subsequent cover stories focused on the babies of 9/11’s dead, children who would never know their mother or father, and, in 2021, on these kids as young adults. This show has a section on Princess Diana, of course, whose death in 1997 produced a special issue, along with wails heard round the world.

People’s first issue, in 1974, displayed Mia Farrow on the cover. She’d just appeared in a movie based on The Great Gatsby. For years, it had serious stories along with good photography. The first issue covered Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and Marina Oswald as well as Gloria Vanderbilt’s fourth marriage — which “seems to work,” we were correctly told — and the race-car driver Richard Petty. A kiosk displays the “Sexiest Man Alive” covers, too.

Fotografiska is a for-profit operation. This isn’t exactly trailblazing. New York’s Museum of Sex and the Museum of Broadway are for-profit museums and places that are serious, though commercial. A few years ago, Yoram Roth, Fotografiska’s majority shareholder, said, “Photography lends itself to a for-profit model because it helps foster a cultural experience.” But what does he mean? Young people fancy photography because so much of it is immediate and about everyday life. The raw material of street photography, which is what Maier practices, is live-action. Even portrait photographs of people we don’t know or, to push the point further, even daguerreotypes seem to live and breathe. Viewers don’t need special knowledge to access them.

In an experience-based economy, what we’re buying isn’t the fixings for a birthday cake but the experience of the party and the taste of buttery frosting. At Fotografiska, art is a bit of a prop to create a memorable experience, but I didn’t care. The art I saw was good. The gallery doesn’t offer a scholarly catalogue specifically for the exhibition, but it sells a trade book on Maier that’s promoted in the very stylish shop.

The gallery interpretation was good, minimalist but focused, relevant, and what I’d call a tasty morsel. People smart enough to have gotten there can dig deeper. I left feeling that I’d learned enough about Maier not to sate my academic turn of mind but to treat me to something new and different. And I got a free drink. There’s a restaurant, too, which functions as a café and lounge and has a small stage for bands or stand-up comedy. Like Maier, I’m a practiced people-watcher. Almost everyone in the galleries came with someone. The spaces weren’t noisy. No one was goofy. It was an agreeable, chatty, comfortable environment.

Fotografiska’s New York staff is small, and most employees are part-time. It does lots of exhibitions. If it has a curator, he or she is more a facilitator than a scholar. There’s no permanent collection. Unseen Work is a joint project with the Musée Luxembourg in Paris and the French museum system — curators galore there — and diChroma Photography in Madrid, which calls itself a “cultural management company” producing packaged photography shows for museums for a fee.

I’m sorry to say that Fotografiska is moving from its impressive, 1890s Renaissance Revival pile. Part of the museum’s cachet, and part of the experience, is this elevating, landmarked building. The issue is probably a greedy landlord. New York is thick with them. As another of its many virtues, Fotografiska’s current home is directly in front of a subway stop. On the very, very icky, hot day I visited, when the last thing I wanted was a schlep, I viewed this as divine intervention.