More than ten years after being the first European gallery to present the work of Vivian Maier, Les Douches la Galerie is devoting a new exhibition—its sixth—to the American photographer, to mark the centenary of her birth. Since the Musée du Luxembourg retrospective in 2022, no exhibition had been dedicated to her in Paris. An invitation to look beyond the effect of revelation, and to attend to the density and complexity of a body of work now fully inscribed in the history of twentieth-century photography.
As early as 2013, even before the release of the documentary film À la recherche de Vivian Maier, Les Douches la Galerie chose to show her photographs, convinced of the intrinsic strength of a body of work that was still little known. Since then, the gallery has continued to accompany its gradual discovery, with several landmark exhibitions—notably Autoportraits in 2015 and Color Works in 2019—exploring her different territories: New York black-and-white in the 1950s, the emergence of color in Chicago, her persistent practice of self-portraiture, and the singularity of her attention to the margins, to everyday gestures, to the almost imperceptible details of urban life.
The exhibition Rue Vivian Maier seeks neither synthesis nor exhaustiveness. It offers a free circulation between iconic images and rarer photographs, between recognizable motifs and quieter forms. Here we find faces caught on the fly, the sometimes biting acuity of her gaze, but also a more contemplative dimension: plays of shadow, fragments of architecture, pared-down compositions in which light becomes a subject in its own right.
At a distance from biographical narratives, this exhibition affirms the formal modernity and deep coherence of Vivian Maier’s work. A photography attentive to the rhythms of the city, to the fissures of everyday life, that continues to reveal new layers of meaning and sensitivity.
Vivian Maier : Rue Vivian Maier
from 29 January to 28 February 2026
Les Douches la Galerie
54, rue Chapon
75003 Paris
www.lesdoucheslagalerie.com
