Vivian Maier, the mysterious nanny photographer, in full color

“I don't know if you want to get into this, but I'm going to say it. Not good things happened to me. Miss Maier forced me to eat because I couldn't finish my plate. My parents found out and my dad got mad. If my father had found out how he did it, he would have been worse off. He would hold me down, shove the food down my throat and choke me until he swallowed it. He did it constantly. He had a very dark side”, recalls Inger Raymond in the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, who as a girl had the photographer Vivian Maier as a nanny.

Made up of fifty images, Vivian Maier– The Color Work, in the Fototeca Latinoamericana (Fola), is the first definitive monograph of color photographs taken by Vivian Maier (New York, 1926 - Chicago, 2009) from the 1970s to his last days, mainly in Chicago and New York. Maier knew how to capture tragedy and tenderness: from these anonymous characters and everyday encounters - rickety mannequins, shop windows, boys, families, elegant women he bumped into on the street - he made invaluable photographic gems that illuminate an authentic vision of human condition.

After a long silence, now an adult woman, Inger Raymond recounts other equally violent experiences of that girl who was when she was cared for by Miss Maier. With some modesty before that tear that memory brings, other men and women, also cared for by Maier in childhood, remember that they suffered confinement in the dark in basements, untimely abandonment on public roads as a lesson, and words that at the time they did not they came to understand, but that later caused itching.

Between those lights and shadows, Miss Maier—of imposing height, she used to wear big coats, felt hats, and men's shoes and a man's shirt—she also knew how to treat the boys with affection. She made plans that excited them, she put on plays and took them on field trips. Without exception of her, she went out with her camera around her neck to take pictures of what she saw on those walks. She generated empathy to the point that the Gensbrug brothers, whom she cared for for 17 years in Chicago, lifted her out of poverty and paid for an apartment for her, already at the end of her life.

Colin Westerbeck, former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago, and specialists from the Howard Greenberg Gallery selected a corpus of images that make up this exhibition project and the book The Color Work, which can be purchased at Fola's bookstore.

The photos on display come from the collection of John Maloof, who discovered Maier's images and today owns most of them. Maloof bought for about $300 a part of the furniture repository that contained Maier's work, which accidentally ended up at auction when the photographer could not pay the rent for the warehouse.

After buying most of the photos, some 150,000 negatives that Maier never revealed, Maloof decided to investigate who the author of these images was and share her work with the world: she published books with her photographs, organized exhibitions and co-directed the excellent documentary Finding Vivian Maier.

Leasing a commercial space can be confusing. So, we outlined the basics to help you get started. Check out our blog… https://t.co/cuN0h0Cx1r

— Crexi Tue Mar 30 23:36:29 +0000 2021

Maier recorded wonderfully powerful images of urban America in the second half of the 20th century. Reserved, she never showed the few photographs she did develop or shared her work or her devotion to taking pictures.

From a young age, she moved away from her mother and started working as a nanny. She had no other family ties or close friends or lovers. In her room she kept thousands of negatives, Super Eight film tapes that she recorded from 1960, audios and newspaper clippings. Her passion for keeping newspapers reached such a point that the room she occupied on the top floor of one of the houses in which she worked was about to collapse: it was necessary to place beams to support it.

In 1956, when she was working as a nanny with a Chicago family she had a dark room and a private bathroom, where she was able to develop her own rolls of black and white film. When she finished her work on that house, already in the early seventies, she did not reveal it again. Paradoxical: her hyper production shows that she was more interested in taking photos than seeing them and that, furthermore, she did not need to see them to continue shooting skillfully.

Maier's face appears reflected in mirrors, glass, stained glass. With her compulsive way of capturing the world and with her self-portraits, she was ahead of the whirlwind of photographing with our cell phones and the selfies that are revealed today.

She had an incredible ability to portray strangers. For black and white photos, she used a Rolleiflex that she didn't need to raise to eye level. It was a camouflaged camera: no one on the street could tell that they were being photographed.

In the rooms next to the Vivian Maier– The Color Work exhibition, you can see the hyper-contemporary portraits of Romina Ressia (Buenos Aires, 1981), who photographs people she summons for castings on Instagram and who later pose in her studio. . With contrasting lights, dazzling colors and careful production that includes period costumes, she creates disturbing characters. Inspired by Renaissance aesthetics, her current Venus series goes against the grain of the canons of dominant beauty.

Far from the nanny photographer label, Maier had a much richer life than is supposed: she traveled alone - camera in hand, of course - through Bangkok, India, Thailand, Egypt, Yemen and South America. Hyper reserved, she always asked that her room have a key and that no one enter. With some people with whom she interacted sporadically, such as the owner of a store where she brought objects to sell, she refused to reveal her name. Her personal life was an enigma.

Pamela Bannos, author of the biography Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife, considers that this mysterious halo, and her notorious secrecy - many also describe her as eccentric - helped her, at least initially, to work as a nanny in those houses of high society family. Maier was cautious about sharing her personal details: No one would want to hire a woman with such a sordid family history. Her father abandoned the family when she was very young; her brother was addicted to drugs; she cut ties with her mother very soon. The only thing known about the rest of the family is that one of her aunts expressly left her inheritance to a friend of hers and did not want anything to go into the hands of Maier, her only niece.

Against the label that describes her as an unwitting master of photography, Bannos is blunt: Maier was not a nanny moonlighting as a photographer, but rather she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny. Furthermore, for the author, Ella Maier was extremely conscious of how her work was developed, printed and cut, although she, she considers her, she made the decision never to exhibit it.

Vivian Maier: The Color Work through September 12. With prior shift at https://fola.com.ar/reserva-de-turnos/. Latin American Photo Library Godoy Cruz 2626, Floor 1, Arcos District, Palermo