Exhibitions
Vivian Maier Musée du Luxembourg, Paris 15th September 2021– 16th January 2022 by lisa stein
Before her belongings were scattered at several auctions two years prior to her death, very few people had heard of Vivian Maier (1926–2009). After she had stopped paying rent on five storage lockers in a warehouse on the North Side of Chicago, her personal possessions – piles of newspapers, newspaper clippings, clothing, books, letters and found objects – as well as hundreds of thousands of negatives, several thousand prints, hundreds of rolls of undeveloped film, audiotapes and amateur film footage were divided between a handful of hobbyists and collectors in late 2007. The most prominent among these individuals is John Maloof, a real estate agent who placed an absentee bid on the largest box of negatives for $380. He subsequently published and sold Maier’s work online and produced several monographs as well as a documentary about her.1 Maier, who was born in New York to a French mother and an Austrian father and began taking photographs in the French Alps around 1950, has become known primarily for her street photographs of New York (1951–56) and Chicago (1956–2009). The exhibition under review, the first comprehensive survey of her work, includes previously unknown photographs, vintage prints, films and a small number of audio recordings that reveal a different side to the photographer.2 An obscure self-portrait, displayed in the first of nine thematically arranged exhibition spaces, seems to encapsulate Maier’s extraordinary life and body of work (Fig.28). The photograph depicts a convex surveillance mirror suspended in the dark corner of a shop. Below it is a magazine rack and warped in its reflection are fluorescent ceiling lights, imparting a lunar glow, and shelves lined with books. In the bottom third of the mirror two figures can be made out, a man browsing a shelf with his back turned toward us, and Maier, facing us, 1196
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expressionless, the lens of her Rolleiflex positioned in the dead centre of the image. The magazines visible on the rack are indicative of Maier’s propensity for collecting and photographing news media, and their titles – Speed Age, Motor Life and Air Progress – hint indirectly at the radical transformation in modes of artistic expression brought on by the progression of technology in Maier’s lifetime, particularly in the medium of photography. Further, her incorporation of a mirror is typical of Maier’s formally inventive selfportraits. Photographs of her reflection in mirrors or shop windows and of her shadow projected onto a lawn or brick wall demonstrate an acute awareness of her role as both ‘surveyor and surveyed’.3 Maier invariably presented herself in relation to her environment; when she photographed her mirror image she rarely looked directly into the lens but captured herself in the act of looking, either at her own reflection or her surroundings. Her exploration of identity is taken to the extreme in another ‘self-portrait’, taken in Chicago in 1959, of a life-insurance check addressed to her, balancing precariously on a handbag. In an essay on the discovery of Maier and her subsequent ‘invention’, the art historian and critic Abigail
27. Untitled, by Vivian Maier. Vintage chromogenic print, 25.5 by 20.2 cm. (Estate of Vivian Maier; courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; exh. Musée du Luxembourg, Paris).
Solomon-Godeau has argued that Maier’s ‘camera “eye” and [. . .] subjective “I” were inextricably linked’ and that she ‘used the camera to confirm her very existence to and for herself ’.4 Similarly, the curator and writer Marvin Heiferman has described Maier’s self-portraits as a form of ‘self-inquiry that is more existential than anecdotal or sociological’.5 These conceptions of Maier’s self-portraits as what SolomonGodeau refers to as ‘wholly solipsistic’ are plausible considering the fact that despite taking hundreds of thousands of photographs, Maier, who worked as a nanny, had no intention of ever showing them; her known extant prints make up only a fraction of her vast archive. In her biography of Maier, the researcher Pamela Bannos notes that ‘what is now known as the “mystery” of Vivian Maier stems from her inclination not to share of herself [sic] or her photographic work’.6 Both Solomon-Godeau and Bannos have contested the image of Maier that has emerged since her ‘discovery’, which they argue was largely manufactured by the individuals that purchased her work. As Solomon-Godeau points out, Maloof is the ‘most energetic and visible’ among these individuals (most of the works in the exhibition are from the Maloof Collection). His documentary Finding Vivian Maier (2013), in which he interviewed families that employed her, certainly cemented her image as the mysterious ‘nanny photographer’. Bannos set out to correct to this narrative – which she argues has been defined ‘by presumptions about and representations of [Maier] as a woman’7 – in her biography, from which Maier emerges not as a hobby photographer but a serious artist. The exhibition testifies to both Maier’s skill and her fearlessness, particularly as a street photographer. Images in the second gallery space reveal Maier’s sensitivity to subtle interactions between individuals – such as two seemingly unrelated women reading the same newspaper or a man and his baby playing with a balloon – as well as her aptitude for using light and shadow to create dramatic compositions of buildings
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and their interiors. Maier’s intimate portraits of strangers from various class backgrounds are displayed in the third section. In her catalogue essay, the exhibition’s curator, Anne Morin, argues that that Maier’s ‘quest for her identity’ (p.12) extended to her portraits, suggesting that she sought out these encounters with others to confirm her own identity. Indeed,
given that Maier is remembered for keeping to herself, it seems probable that, shielded by the anonymity of the city, she imposed herself physically onto passers-by simply to feel seen. But whereas some of her subjects willingly engaged with and even posed for Maier, the disapproving facial expressions of others indicate that her bold approach was not always welcome.
28. Untitled, by Vivian Maier. 1960. Gelatin silver print, printed 2012, 40 by 50 cm. (Estate of Vivian Maier; courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; exh. Musée du Luxembourg, Paris).
The fourth section presents a selection of themes that Maier would revisit, including what Solomon-Godeau refers to as ‘unconscious subjects (as well as unwitting ones), many back views and many fragmented bodies’, noting ‘the frequency with which Maier photographed the backs of legs’.8 It is likely that Maier often photographed
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individuals sleeping or reading because she could get closer to her subject. Newspapers, which Maier collected compulsively – much to the dismay of those she worked for – feature prominently in this section, notably in a group of nineteen vintage colour prints from the mid-1970s: rolled up in the back pocket of a man’s trousers, neatly stacked in front of a news stand and, inevitably, crumpled up and discarded on the street or in a litter bin. Her fascination with the daily broadsheet is one of Maier’s most intriguing characteristics; aside from an interest in current events and local news, the headlines she photographed reveal her inclination for, as one of her former employers astutely observes, ‘things that reveal the folly of humanity’.9 Maier’s less familiar and hitherto unseen works are divided between five further exhibition spaces devoted to her work in colour; photographs 1198
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of children; sequences of images that indicate a burgeoning interest in cinema; a selection of Super 8 and 16mm films; and, in the final section, photographs of textures and objects that suggest a shift in focus away from narrative. This half of the exhibition reveals a different side to Maier, one that was not preoccupied with her identity, as a woman or a photographer, but with the physical qualities and limitations of her chosen medium. There are images of shadows cast onto walls – this time not Maier’s silhouettes – that allude to a form of portraiture rendered obsolete after the invention of photography (Fig.27). A series of moving ‘portraits’ of what were presumably Maier’s charges only ever depict one of their eyes, peering through a gap in the grid of a woven lawn chair or an industrial hole punched into cardboard packaging, openings that echo Maier’s lens; there are photographs taken through screens,
29. Untitled, by Vivian Maier. 1959. Gelatin silver print, printed 2020, 40 by 50 cm. (Estate of Vivian Maier; courtesy Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York; exh. Musée du Luxembourg, Paris).
open doors, concrete drainage pipes and bus windows (Fig.29) – these images are about the act of looking and framing. By choosing to end the exhibition with Maier’s lesser-known works, rather than interweaving these with her street photography and portraits, Morin succeeds in telling a different, more nuanced story about the photographer. However, the question was never how she wanted to be seen, but remains, as both Solomon-Godeau and Bannos have pointed out, whether Maier wanted to be seen at all. Walking through the exhibition, viewers will rightly ask themselves ‘whose vision (or aesthetic preference, or sensibility, or point of view) is actually being represented’?10 This is not lost on Morin, who on a few occasions has installed vintage prints by Maier next to those made by Maloof or under his instruction. These comparisons clearly demonstrate that Maier intended to crop the square negatives produced by her Rolleiflex. On account of a letter that Maier sent to a photography studio in France about possibly printing her photographs as postcards, Maloof has concluded that she did intend to show or publish her work. We may never know the answer. However, what little we do know about this undeniably accomplished photographer, and our ability to continue to conduct further research into her eventful life, we owe to the efforts of those that purchased and took an active interest in her work, whether she would have wanted them to or not. 1 See J. Maloof: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, New York 2011; idem: Vivian Maier: Self Portraits, New York 2013; and idem: Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found, New York 2014. See also Finding Vivian Maier, directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, 2013. 2 Catalogue: Vivian Maier. Edited by Anne Morin. 256 pp. incl. 250 col. + b. & w. ills. (Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais and DiChroma, Paris, 2021), €40. ISBN 978–2–7118–7842–0. The exhibition will travel to MK Gallery, Milton Keynes (11th June to 11th September 2022). 3 See J. Berger: Ways of Seeing, London 2008, p.46. 4 See A. Solomon-Godeau: ‘Inventing Vivian Maier: categories, careers, and commerce’ (2013), in S. Parsons, ed.: Photography After Photography: Gender, Genre, History, Durham and London 2017, pp.141–55, at p.153. 5 See M. Heiferman: ‘How we see her. How she saw herself’, Photoworks Annual 22 (2015), p.11. 6 See P. Bannos: Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, Chicago and London 2017, p.12.
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7 See Bannos, op. cit. (note 6), p.3; and R. Lichter-Marck: ‘Vivian Maier and the problem of difficult women’, The New Yorker, 9th May 2014, available at https://www.newyorker.com/ culture/culture-desk/vivian-maier-and-theproblem-of-difficult-women, accessed 6th November 2021. 8 See Solomon-Godeau, op. cit. (note 4), p.151. 9 See Maloof and Siskel, op. cit. (note 1). 10 See Solomon-Godeau, op. cit. (note 4), p.143.
Sutapa Biswas: Lumen Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge 16th October 2021–30th January 2022 by julie hrischeva
from her birthplace of Santiniketan, West Bengal, to London. Her father, a Marxist academic, had already fled from political persecution in India, arriving in London six months earlier. Lumen is the centrepiece at Kettle’s Yard and a concurrent exhibition at BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead. Screened at both venues, the film also lends its name to the two shows, which span four decades of Biswas’s career. The BALTIC display reflects on its proximity to the Tyne with a focus on colonial histories of nautical
30. Still from Lumen, by Sutapa Biswas. 2021. Single channel digital film, duration 30 minutes (© Sutapa Biswas; photograph Carlotta Cardana; DACS 2021).
trade, while the more intimate space at Kettle’s Yard explores the concept of home and wider communities of women in the artist’s life.1 In the first gallery, painted a stark, institutional white, we are confronted by Biswas’s reimagination of the Hindu goddess Kali (in Sanskrit, ‘she who is black’) as a powerful matriarch. The painting Housewives with Steakknives (Fig.31; no.I) is designed to sit forward from the wall and hangs at an imposing angle. In the work, the artist employs Modernist tropes, such as flat planes of colour, in order to subvert
‘Swallow me whole and spit me not out’ implores the neon text of Sutapa Biswas’s silver green against dark navy (2015; cat. no.XXVII), a plea that is also echoed in the artist’s new film Lumen (2021; Fig.30). This thought came to Biswas (b.1962) while on an artist residency in Japan in 2015, just as the refugee crisis was unfolding across the Middle East and Europe, and while she was contemplating not only the perilous sea voyages many fleeing their homelands were forced to make, but also the life that awaited them on arrival. Biswas’s urgent call articulates a desire for acceptance: to be welcomed fully and not spat out by a new community where one seeks to make their home. Lumen is a semi-fictional reimagining of the artist’s matrilineal family history, which interweaves memories of migration and diaspora across time and space. The film’s primary location is the ornate Red Lodge Museum in Bristol, where a poetic, non-linear monologue, written by Biswas, is recited by the actress Natasha Patel in the roles of the artist’s mother and grandmother. These scenes are intercut with a present-day film of the sea and banyan trees in India and archival footage of British families and their Indian servants from the late period of the British Raj. The film thematically traverses various crossings: the passage of slaves across the Indian Ocean; Biswas’s grandmother’s displacement following Partition in 1947; and the artist’s voyage as a child in 1966 with her mother and siblings, which took her the burlington magazine | 163 | december 2021
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