NEW YORK, NY.- Fotografiska New York is presenting the first major retrospective in the United States showcasing the work of the late photographer Vivian Maier.

Unseen Work runs from May 31 through September 29, 2024 at Fotografiska New York and features approximately 230 works from the early 1950s to the late 1990s, including vintage and modern prints, color, black and white, super 8 films, and audio recordings, offering a complete vision of the artist’s rich archive, which serves as a fascinating testimony to post-war America and the facade of the American dream.

“Fotografiska is proud to be the first museum in Vivian Maier’s hometown of New York to present a large-scale exhibition of her work,” says Sophie Wright, Executive Director of Fotografiska. “The story of the discovery of her extraordinary archive transcends photography, and her talent has captivated audiences worldwide. We’re grateful to be able to share her work for existing fans to enjoy, while giving new audiences a chance to discover her.”

Mounted by diChroma photography and Fotografiska New York, in collaboration with the John Maloof Collection, Chicago, and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, Unseen Work debuted at Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, in 2021, co-organized by diChroma photography and the Réunion des musées nationaux Grand Palais.

Though today considered one of the greatest photographers of the twentieth century, Maier’s work was unknown during her lifetime. Maier took photos for herself alone and had a fierce desire for privacy; combined with a lack of stability in her career and finances, this prevented her from developing her own film. She placed undeveloped, unprinted work in storage with her other belongings in the early 2000s, when she moved between living in a small studio apartment and being unhoused. Due to unpaid rental fees, the negatives were auctioned off by the storage company in 2007, and a large portion were purchased by John Maloof. Maloof, a filmmaker and photographer himself, became the first person to bring Maier’s work into the public eye and began to promote it widely just after her passing in 2009.

Unseen Work sheds new light on Maier’s extensive body of work and focus on the major themes that defined her creative output. In street scenes and sidewalk chronicles, portraits, and self-portraits, as well as gestures, fragmentation and repetition, color photography, cinetism, and film, Maier took a humanist approach to photography that resulted in meticulous documentation of the major socio-political changes of the period. Many of Maier’s images and portraits observe in detail the working-class neighborhoods in New York and Chicago that she explored from many angles.

“Vivian Maier captures the often challenging realities of American life in the late 20th century with great empathy and nuance,” says Anne Morin, director of diChroma photography and the show's curator. “This is a homecoming, and we are thrilled to collaborate with Fotografiska to bring Vivian’s work back to New York, a city that informed and inspired some of her best work.”

With a focus on people on the margins of society who weren’t usually photographed and of whom images were rarely published, Maier’s austere portraits were taken on city streets the moment before the subject realized they were being photographed and provide a truly candid view into the times.

Practicing photography was one of the only ways Vivian Maier could make sense of the world and express herself freely. Born to a French mother and Austrian father in the Bronx in 1926, Maier spent her early years between New York and France, where she started exploring photography in the late 1940s. In 1951, Maier returned to New York City where she was hired as a governess, an occupation she would hold for the next 40 years. In 1956, she moved to the North Shore suburbs of Chicago, where she landed a position with a family of three boys.

Maier’s job as a caretaker allowed her to continue pursuing photography, while feeding her interest in capturing childhood through her lens.

Maier’s self-portraits mark milestones in her body of work as she experiments with a variety of visual devices and typologies to signify her presence in the image, such as playing with shadows and projected silhouettes, reflections, and image within an image.

Maier’s work reveals how distant the American Dream is for most Americans, portraying through photography and film the everyday challenges they face that prevents them from economic mobility – debilitating poverty, long hours of labor, depression – some of which she experienced herself before receiving financial support later in life from the children she once nannied.