Vivian Maier. Self-portraits.

The nanny with a camera

Vivian Maier was born in 1926 and died in 2009. An American, she worked as a nanny for about forty years, from the 1950s on, first in New York and then in Chicago. Throughout those years she photographed. Street life, portraits of strangers, the children she knew. And herself.

In her lifetime almost no one knew Maier was a photographer. She did not exhibit, did not publish, did not seek an audience. Many of her rolls were never even developed.

In 2007 her archive was found by chance in a Chicago warehouse. It held more than 120,000 negatives, Super 8 and 16 mm films, audio recordings, prints, and hundreds of undeveloped rolls. The archive was rescued through auctions, and only then did people begin to see what she had seen.

Mirrors, glass and shadows

In that archive, self-portraits and shadow images of Maier make up more than a quarter of the work. That is a large share for someone who never showed her pictures to anyone.

Yet Maier rarely photographed her face head on. She used whatever the city offered. A mirror hung in a shop. The glass of a display window. A bright metal surface. And many times her own shadow, stretched along the pavement, on a wall, on the ground in front of her shoes.

In these pictures she often appears with her camera. The photographer and the subject are one. Sometimes she sits at the edge of the frame, sometimes half cut off, sometimes only a dark shape without clear lines. The viewer has to search to find her.

This gives Maier's pictures a particular reserve. She is present, but she takes no space. She records that she was there, while letting the city own the frame.

A shadow is the poorest image of a person. No eyes, no expression, no age. Only a posture, the length of an afternoon, the direction of the sun. Yet after looking at these shadows long enough, the viewer starts to recognise her: the stance, the shoulders, the camera at her chest. A person recognised through the least.

The self-portrait and its double

In 2020 the Finnish Museum of Photography at the Cable Factory in Helsinki showed these self-portraits in the exhibition The Self-portrait and its Double, from 17 January to 24 May. The curator was Anne Morin. It gathered 83 photographs and films from 1953 to 1986, and was the first showing of Maier's work in Finland.

The title points to what makes these pictures unusual: the self-portrait always comes with a shadow, a copy. Each reflection is a second Maier, slightly off, slightly warped, never quite the same as the woman standing outside it.

Set side by side, the pictures show a woman looking at herself for three decades through the surfaces of a city. Not to show off. Perhaps to be sure she had been there. A kind of self-portrait close to the shadows and reflections in Lee Friedlander's pictures, but quieter, because no one was meant to see.

Maier's self-portraits are memorable because they reverse the usual order. Usually people become known first and are looked at closely afterward. With Maier, the traces were already there, only waiting for the day they would be opened.