Vivian Maier Unseen Work @ Fotografiska, Tallinn
I first need to spend a little time on the story around “Who was Vivian Maier, and who actually discovered Maier’s photographs?”
Vivian Maier lived a lonely life without any significant luxury. But she photographed throughout her entire adult life. Mainly in Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. She was born in New York. Her mother was French and her father was from Austria. In 1951, at the age of 25, Vivian moved from France to New York, where she made a living working in a clothing store. Five years later, in 1956, she moved to Chicago and started working as a nanny and caregiver. She continued doing this for the next 40 years.
She was an extremely introverted person and mostly lived her private life alone. Her obvious friend was the two-eyed Rolleiflex she wandered around with, documenting whatever she found along the way. A kind of photographic “Askeladden”. (Askeladden was a Norwegian fairy-tale character who saw value in everything he found.)
Towards the end of her life, the story goes that her remaining boxes of negatives and prints were put up for a so-called blind auction, where you bid on boxes without really knowing what is inside them. It was a Chicago-based collector named John Maloof who bought the material. But some boxes were also bought by two other collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow.
This was in 2007, meaning two years before Maier passed away. But the story goes that her boxes were put up for sale by the owner of her last residence in order to cover unpaid rent.
Already in July 2008, the first photographs were published online, on a blog run by Ron Slattery. But the pictures did not attract much attention. Just a few months later, in October 2008, John Maloof posted photographs from Maier’s archive in a discussion thread on the photography website Flickr.
Then it exploded, and the pictures went viral. The rest is history! The Vivian Maier phenomenon has been written into the history of photography forever.
Since then, countless books have been published, films have been made, and some of the biggest photographic institutions in the world have mounted major exhibitions. Now it was Fotografiska in Tallinn’s turn!
I made my way to Fotografiska that evening with some expectations. The rain was pouring down and the gates of heaven had opened completely. So I was glad I had gone early, because I simply had to sit down in a restaurant nearby to dry off before the opening.
That worked out, and I squeezed my way through a very tightly packed venue. There was obviously a lot of interest surrounding this event.
The exhibition is massive
I don’t know how many photographs there are in the exhibition, but this requires time.The exhibition was nicely put together, and you found series of photographs that were thematically arranged rather than chronological. One series with hands as the main subject, another where newspaper pages dominated, and a series of self-portraits are also part of this extensive Maier exhibition.
As I said, the exhibition was so large that I would actually recommend people spend two days on it, if possible. There are so many photographs that at some point you reach a kind of saturation point. Now, it may be that I was a little influenced by the situation right there and then. There was a constant flow of people, and I had after all already spent several hours at Foto Tallinn, a photography festival taking place this weekend, earlier in the day.
But anyway, I know from experience that you can get well “paid” for seeing an exhibition like this twice, with some time in between for everything to sink in.
Well, I think most people today are familiar enough with Maier’s photographs that there isn’t really much more to say than that this is Maier’s diary in pictures. They are snapshots. There are countless small everyday moments captured on film. The photographs are not necessarily anything more than important witnesses to a different time.
But the sheer scale of the material, the story behind it, and the analogue photograph being shown here in our digital world, -yes, it is impressive.
I think many people who photograph seriously in their own backyard will find parallels to their own work in this exhibition. So much of the magic lies in the fact that it is such an extensive body of work, and that Maier emerges as a somewhat mysterious figure who never had any need to show her life’s work to anyone else.
She obviously photographed only for herself, driven by her own inner personal motivation. It becomes unbeatable over time simply because it is a unique voice that was never guided by commercial considerations. It is brutally honest, and first and foremost, honest towards yourself.
The exhibition is open until January 17, 2027.