The late American street photographer Vivian Maier (1926–2009) has had her never-before-seen color images displayed in an exhibition at Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York. ‘Vivian Maier: The Color Work’ showcases the highlights of her truly original photography.
Maier worked as a nanny, and over several decades took many thousands of pictures as an anonymous photographer; showing them to no one. Maier’s remarkable talent was discovered by chance just a few years before her passing in 2007, when real estate agent John Maloof came across the contents of her storage locker. Inside, over 100,000 medium format negatives were found, along with undeveloped rolls of film, and thousands of prints. The discovery of Maier’s rare talent rocked the art world, and in 2015, Maloof created ‘Finding Vivian Maier’, a documentary that was nominated for an Academy Award. As a result of this fame, Maier is known posthumously for her considered approach to black and white street photography. However at the time of the documentary’s production, Maloof had not yet developed around 700 rolls of Maier’s color photographs, a selection of which is now on show in ‘Vivian Maier: The Color Work’. The exhibition features Maier’s documentation of the happenings of New York and Chicago from the 1950s to the 1980s, presenting a vivid array of images brimming with color and vitality.The discovery of Maier’s rare talent rocked the art world
All image © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York
