A retrospective exhibition featuring the work of a female street photographer whose impressive oeuvre was only discovered at the end of her life – and then immediately caused a worldwide sensation. Vivian Maier (b.1926 – d. 2009) worked as a governess for more than four decades from the early 1950s onwards. Her entire life inevitably passed by unnoticed, until in 2007 her photographic body of work was discovered: a colossal archive consisting of more than 120,000 negatives, super 8 mm and 16 mm films, various recordings, miscellaneous photographs, and a multitude of undeveloped films. The presentation in the Willy-Brandt-Haus, Berlin, provides a glimpse of the fine eye and subtlety with which Maier appropriated the visual language of her age.

Maier photographed the street, people, objects, landscapes in her spare time; simply put, she ultimately and abruptly photographed what she saw. She knew how to capture her era in a fraction of a second. She narrated the beauty of ordinary things, seeking the imperceptible cracks and elusive in-flections of the real in everyday banality.

The exhibition's prints come from the collection of John Maloof, Chicago.
With the Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.

Vivian Maier -
Curator Anne Morin -