Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier Out of the Shadows  

February 7 - March 3, 2013

Blue Sky is pleased to present a special selection of 40 photographs from Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows, chosen in collaboration with the Jeffrey Goldstein Collection, an archive of approximately 20,000 negatives shot by recently discovered photographer Vivian Maier (1926 - 2009). 

The images in our exhibition range from 1955 to 1973. Likened to Lisette Model, Leon Levinstein, Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand, Weegee, and Helen Levitt; the reclusive and undiscovered Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago from the 1950s well into the 1990s. In 2007, a historian discovered more than 100,000 photographs of street life she had taken during that time and put in storage. Very quickly, her work began to receive critical acclaim.

There is still very little known about the life of Vivian Maier. What is known is that she was born in New York in 1926 and worked as a nanny for a family on Chicago's North Shore during the '50s and '60s. Seemingly without a family of her own, the children she cared for eventually acted as caregivers for Maier herself in her later life. She took hundreds of thousands of photographs in her lifetime, but seemed to have never shared them with anyone. Maier lost possession of her accumulated images when a storage locker housing them was sold off for non-payment. She passed away in 2009, at the age of 83.