New York, NY, 1954 © Vivian Maier
EXHIBITION REVIEW: VIVIAN MAIER AND STEPHAN VANFLETEREN: CAPTURING LIFE
Exhibition Review: Vivian Maier and Stephan Vanfleteren: Capturing Life
Gallery Fifty One, Antwerp, Belgium
May 8 – July 10, 2021
Words by Trevor Bishai
Many have heard the unique story of Vivian Maier’s rise to fame: nobody in the photography world knew who she was until two years before her death, when a collector, John Maloof, stumbled upon her work after it was auctioned from a storage unit Maier was renting. Prior to this discovery, Maier’s photographs were not published at all; even some of her negatives were never developed. For close to forty years, Maier worked as a nanny in Chicago and had no claim to the higher echelons of photography or fine art.