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| Photo by Vivian Maier |
Vivian Maier: Anthology review – the eccentric nanny with an eye for a picture
MK gallery, Milton Keynes
The first large-scale UK show of work by this mysterious street photographer asks: who was this woman? And did she know how good she was?
Adrian Searle
Vivian Maier was unknown as an artist during her lifetime. Wildly prolific, and with an eye and an attitude all her own, she left more than 150,000 photographs, some printed by herself, many processed as negatives and yet more still undeveloped and left in their canisters. They filled boxes and suitcases and trunks, which spilled out their contents in avalanches of film rolls and envelopes, carefully preserved and lodged in storage facilities until the money ran out on their lockers and they were auctioned off.
Eventually, and serendipitously, they began to come to light when Maier, late in life, was almost destitute and almost certainly mentally ill, more forgotten than remembered except to the families who had employed her as a nanny in Chicago, New York and Minneapolis. Remembered too by some of her subjects and the people she wandered among with her camera and her funny, old-fashioned clothes on the streets of the cities where she had spent her peculiar double life as a children’s nanny and compulsive photographer.
