Still open up until September 22nd, the exhibition “Vivian Maier. The Self-portrait and its Double” sheds light on the art and life of the greatest discovery of photography in the last 20 years: a photographer of great technical and artistic depth who has never published a single photo during her life. Her rolls discovered only by chance from a collector, now the works of Vivian Maier are going around the world. In Trieste the last exhibition, focused on her self-portraits.
Who was Vivian Maier

For many, Maier was just a “nanny”: born in 1926, she worked as a babysitter for most of her life, from the 1950s to the 1990s between Chicago and New York, but at the same time she did never miss an opportunity to take pictures with her Rolleiflex and her Leica, with which she told the moments in everyday life, like a true street photographer. Her subjects were always ordinary people: workers, beggars, women in admiration in front of a shop window whose everyday life was imprinted forever on film thanks to Maier’s deep and attentive gaze, in a clear and fascinating black and white.
The exhibition “Vivian Maier. The Self-portrait and its Double””
At the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste 70 self-portraits of Maier are now being exhibited – 59 in black and white and 11 in colors shown for the first time in Italy – in which the photographer portrays herself on reflective surfaces, mirrors or shop windows. Her attention and technique are impeccable: even shooting on the most unlikely surfaces (from shop windows to car bonnets) she manages to elaborate an infinite return of her image, that seems to play with all possibilities of photography.
The exhibition also explores the theme of shadows in the work of the great American photographer: these are “hidden” portraits in which Vivian Maier steals the image of her own shadow in different positions and contexts while stretching on reflective surfaces, mirrors or shop windows. A silhouette and a double that seem to want to make present what is absent, in an infinite game between Maier and her double in which it is difficult not to read the possible solitude and that love for photography that led her to take thousands of photos in her life but always in total solitude.
Immagine di copertina:
©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY
Target Point, Italian Ideas