Exhibition: Vivian Maier - Street Photographer

Vivian Maier, four portraits, New York, NY, 1953-56

This afternoon a friend of mine and I went to the exhibition of "Vivian Maier, Street Photographer" in FOAM over here in Amsterdam. I've wanted to see it for a while and since I am having two weeks off it is the perfect opportunity to go ahead and see it.

Vivian Maier, self portrait, undated

The entrance of the exhibition itself was a bit unfortunate: it started in this long and small corridor with on one side a lot of photos and on the opposite wall a long text with an introduction, storyline and resume. It was quite crowded before I got to the end of the corridor and I was standing in everybody's way.

entrance of exhibition: Vivian Maier, Street Photographer

The exhibited photos were wonderful though. She left behind a ton of work of about 120.000 photos on which people from all walks of life are photographed. You can see the curiosity for the people around her in the photographs. Her photographs are also quite direct: people are looking at her whether they like it to have their photograph taken or not.

two women looking at photographs of Vivian Maier

9 self portraits of Vivian Maier

For some reason she took a lot of self portraits, shown above are nine of them. In most of them she looks quite stern, unsmiling and eyes looking elsewhere. All self portraits are reflections in anything that she found on the street and indoors, some of them very ingenious.

my friend C. looking at Vivian Maier's photos

self portrait of Vivian Maier, undated: shadow and reflection in a ball

In the seventies she switched from black & white photography to colour and you can see the change in her work immediately: colour takes a prominent place in her photographs.

three people in yellow, Chicago, IL, 1975

The following pictures are two of my favorites of the exhibition, they took my breath away:

Vivian Maier: untitled, Chicago, IL, April 20, 1956

Vivian Maier: untitled, New York, NY, not dated

In both photographs I love the subtle light, the patterns and the lines. She clearly had an eye for the everyday.
The exhibition as a whole is well worth seeing: Vivian's images are straight forward, subtle, raw, funny and endearing. It is on in Amsterdam until 1 February, 2015. 
All photos are taken with an iPod touch.