VIVIAN MAIER at Stephen Bulger Gallery (1026 Queen West), to September 14. 416-504-0575. See listing. Rating: NNNN
An artist doggedly creates a major body of work over a lifetime, never sharing it with anyone: Vivian Maier’s puzzling story makes a great subject for a documentary. Her discoverer, Chicago historian John Maloof, has now co-directed one, Finding Vivian Maier, screening at TIFF.
Photography was Maier’s passion and raison d’être. The Franco-American woman, who worked as a nanny, wandered New York City and Chicago snapping urban mid-century Americans and streetscapes with a keen and sophisticated eye.
Two years before she died in 2009, Maloof purchased a box of her negatives that a storage facility sent to auction for non-payment of rent. He’s now assembled a massive Maier archive, and interest began mounting when he posted her photos on Flickr.
The crisp 1-foot-square black-and-white prints in Out Of The Shadows at Stephen Bulger were made from negatives belonging to another collector. Mostly from the 50s and 60s, they show the range of Maier’s concerns: children and the elderly posed or shot on the fly with an eye for character and idiosyncrasy, street litter and junk sales, reflective surfaces and poetic urban lighting. Her liberal political bent is evident in documentation of the 1968 Chicago convention riots and an elegiac still life displaying the newspaper headline “Bobby Dies.”
Her presence is strongest in her self-portraits, where she uses such pre-digital tricks as shooting into mirrors or capturing her own shadow. They’re haunting images of a loner for whom photography was everything making photographs about herself taking a photograph.
Many questions remain: Given the volume of images she shot, are these a few fortuitous accidents? (People who’ve examined the archive think not.)
Are the new prints what she intended? Can you call someone who must have had knowledge of her contemporaries an outsider artist? What would she make of her current success and $2,000 price tags?
And, even in these fame-seeking times, is extraordinary hidden art still out there waiting to be unearthed?
(A show of Maier photos from the Maloof collection runs daily from noon to 6 pm until September 15, then by appointment to October 15, at 23 Morrow, lower level, 416-689-9565, isaspalding.com).
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