When Vivian Maier, in her early thirties and with a camera around her neck, traveled to Egypt to see the Sphinx in the late 1950s, she must have known on some level that she was turning into one herself. Over the course of a lifetime, she’d experienced both the democratizing and the addictive natures of photography. When she died in 2009, Maier left behind an extraordinary archive of approximately 150,000 photographic images – negatives, transparencies, prints, and rolls of undeveloped films 0 that few had known of, heard about, or seen. But once they did, and as news of Vivian Maier’s work and life spread via social media, the woman who was so passionate but guarded about picture taking while alive become celebrated for it in death. This beautiful album is a spcer through the streets of New York, Chicago, the heated pavements of Florida, the Canadian towns of the 1950s. For us, Vivian Maier’s photographs are a picture of the America of those years, a picture that is often ironic, full of humour, and sometimes highly critical. We let ourselves be carried away by these images. And we let ourselves be reminded that reality is in fact full of charm.
