The small publisher CityFiles press published this month a new monograph dedicated to Vivian Maier, following an earlier release by powerHouse Books. This new work is organized in sections, and features many never- seen before photographs.
Given the sheer number of photographs taken by Vivan Maier, we will probably need a few months before we know them all. But this book, edited by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, introduces a number of new images. Here we follow Maier not only through America’s largest cities, but also during her travels in France in the early 1950s. It was a country she was already familiar with, having spent some of her childhood there with her French mother, Marie Maier.
France was where Vivan Maier first developed a passion for photographing countrysides, before returning to her home town of New York in 1939. The art critic Allan Sekula compares Maier’s experience in France with Robert Frank’s in America: “She had an open and inclusive and very fundamental idea of what constituted ‘America’ that was missed by a lot of photographers in the 1950s and 1960s.” Through her photographs, we discover the tenderness, humor and acuity on every face she captured, and always with her characteristic humanity. In this book, the reader will linger over both her timeless beach scenes, and those that tell the story of how she practiced photography both day and night. Before it was possible to discern her predilection for light, shadows and reflections. But now we discover that another passion was the details and mystery of nature.
Apart from the architectural shots and still lifes, this series reveals the same poetry in a square format. Once again, we admire the beauty of a walk, the singularity of an other, laughter, tears, children’s games, and faces, white, black, old, suspicious or trusting. There’s nothing exceptional in the scenes Vivian Maier saw fit to capture. But through their simple and romantic vision of life, they serve as a contribution to our collective memory. Out of the Shadows offers Maier a second chapter in a new life.
Jonas Cuénin
Vivian Maier, Out of the Shadows
CityFiles Press
288 pages
$60
ISBN : 978-0978545093
