Canada, 1950s.A picture is sometimes built on a coincidence that the photographer was quick enough to keep.
Chicago, IL, c. 1952.We are down on the pavement, necks tilted, looking up into the underside of the RKO Grand marquee, where the neon spells its name in hot cursive and a border of bare bulbs runs in bright dotted seams…
New York, 1953.A flat, overcast light pours off the harbor and floods the deck, bleaching the sky to blank white and thinning the distant Manhattan skyline to a row of pale, dissolving towers.
New York, NY, February 9, 1953.An hour from now this geometry will be gone: the low winter sun that cuts each bulkhead and coping into hard diagonals will have moved on, and the parapet will go back to being merely a wall.
Self-portrait, New York, NY, 1954.How does a woman photograph herself without ever quite showing her face to the camera?
New York, NY, 1955.What is he doing up there, the man in the suit?
New York, NY, c. 1955.A single dark seam runs straight down the middle of the frame and cuts the street in two.
Chicago, 1956.A single red patent heel, glossy as a boiled sweet and tapered to a neat cone, plants itself on the terracotta tile and reorganizes everything around it.
Chicago, IL, June 16, 1956.In June of 1956, on a Chicago sidewalk she would have walked as a nanny rather than as the artist no one yet knew her to be, Vivian Maier turned her Rolleiflex toward a woman she would never name.
Untitled, Self-portrait, 1956.A shadow is photography's first draft. Before lenses and chemistry there was simply a body interrupting light and a surface receiving its outline; every photograph since has been a scheme for keeping…
Chicago, IL, May, 1957.Who left them there, and why three? A glass half full of something pale, a white plastic tub with its lid set askew, and behind the pair a darker squat can keeping its own counsel.
Self-portrait, 1957.Two women share a single frame, but only one of them knows a picture is being made.
Chicago, 1960.Chicago, 1960. Behind the glass of a modest storefront, a small crowd of mannequins gathers into a silent chorus of bodies without voices.
Chicago, IL, c. 1960.Photography has always been fascinated by the figure seen from behind, walking away, its face surrendered to the street; this picture joins that lineage and sharpens it.
Chicago, 1961.A photograph can love a stranger’s ankle more honestly than any admirer.
Chicago Area, 1961.The largest bubble will thin, wobble, and vanish against the brick any second now; a moment ago it was only breath and a filmed wire ring.
New York, New York, 1965.The picture withholds every face. Under the ferry’s curved canopy, backlit almost to pure black, a handful of passengers stand at the railing as silhouettes — a figure in a hat, a child, a man beside…
Bus at DuskPhotography has kept an appointment with the lit vehicle in falling snow at least since Stieglitz stood hours in a Fifth Avenue blizzard for his omnibus.
CanadaTwo girls hold the doorway of a shop as if it were the edge of the known world.
UntitledSilver wire, looped and sprung, fills the frame edge to edge: the coiled guts of an old bed, stripped of its mattress and turned into a thicket of bright metal against black.
UntitledA woman in white walks toward the camera on a city pavement with her mouth open on a word.