The Self-portrait and its Double
At the Magazzino delle Idee in Trieste, the Regional Agency for Cultural Heritage presents the exhibition ‘Vivian Maier. The Self-portrait and its Double”: seventy black and white and colour self-portraits tell the story of Vivian Maier’s mysterious life.
Running from 20 July to 22 September 2019, the exhibition curated by Anne Morin ofChroma Photography, Madrid, and realised and organised by the Regional Cultural Heritage Board in collaboration with the John Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York, aims to tell the story of how the artist saw herself and how she perceived the world around her.
‘If you have something to say, it’s better to do it from behind the camera than in front of it’.
Vivian Maier
Vivian Maier spent her entire life in anonymity until 2007, when her immense and impressive work, consisting of more than 120,000 negatives, Super 8mm and 16mm films, several sound recordings, a few photographs and hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film, was discovered by John Maloof, a photographer by passion and estate agent by profession.
After printing some photos, Maloof publishes them on Flickr, gaining a strong interest that goes viral. He therefore decides to investigate the woman who took those photographs.
The artist
Vivian Maier was born in New York on 1 February 1926. Her parents soon separated and the daughter was left in the care of her mother, who moved in with a French friend, Jeanne Bertrand, a professional photographer.
In the 1930s the two women and little Vivian travelled to France, where Vivian lived until the age of 12.
In 1938 she returned to New York, where she began her life as a governess and nanny. A role she would hold for over forty years.
For years Vivian Maier was only a ‘French nanny’ while, in the small room provided by the family she lived with, she cultivated an immense passion, photography.
Vivian spends her life capturing images, first with a Rolleiflex camera resting on her belly, and then with the Leica in front of her eyes.
She reproduces the emotional chronicle of everyday reality. The subjects of his photographs are people he meets in the slums of cities, fragments of a chaotic reality teeming with life, instants captured in their simple spontaneity. Many photos testify to the artist’s travels around the world, with an astonished and intrigued gaze on contemporary society.
The exhibition
In the series of self-portraits exhibited at the Magazzino delle Idee, the artist portrays himself on reflective surfaces, mirrors or shop windows.
His interest in self-portraiture is more a desperate search for his own identity.
She discreetly produces irrefutable evidence of her presence in a world that seems to have no place for her. Reflections of her face in a mirror or in an endless return of her image, her shadow stretching on the ground, or the outline of her figure: each of Vivian Maier’s self-portraits is an affirmation of her presence in that particular place, at that particular time.
The recurring feature, which has become a signature in her self-portraits, is the shadow: that silhouette whose main feature is its being attached to the body, that copy of the body in negative, ‘taken from reality’, which has the capacity to make present what is absent.
In fact, although the shadow demonstrates the existence of a subject, at the same time it cancels its presence. Within this duality, Vivian Maier plays with the self to the point of disappearing and reappearing in her double, perhaps recognising that the self-portrait is a ‘third-person intervention that demonstrates the coexistence of presence and absence.’
Self-portraits in black and white, the theme of the double revealed in mirrors and reflective objects, 11 colour photographs, never exhibited in Italy and made after the 1960s, recount the transition from the Rolleiflex to the Leica. In addition, Super 8 films shot by the artist herself and the documentary film ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ directed by John Maloof in 2013 accompany the photographs in the exhibition.
Opening hours
Tuesday-Sunday from 10 am to 8 pm
Closed on Monday
Special opening 15 August
The ticket office closes half an hour earlier
Tickets
Full price € 6.00
Reduced price* € 4.00
65 years of age; children aged 11 to 18 years; students up to 26 years of age; disabled persons
*document required
Groups and children € 3.00
children from 6 to 11 years of age
Free of charge
Children up to the age of 6; group leaders (1 per group); teachers visiting with pupils/students (2 per group); one accompanying person per disabled person; journalists with a regular membership card of the National Association of Journalists (professionals, trainees, publicists) on duty, upon request of accreditation at: info@magazzinodelleidee.it.
Press office
ddl studio | T +39 02 8905.2365 | Alessandra de Antonellis | E-mail: alessandra.deantonellis@ddlstudio.net Margherita Baleni | E-mail: margherita.baleni@battage.net
Exhibition and texts by Anne Morin
Realisation and organisation Regional Cultural Heritage Authority
Anna Del Bianco General director
Simona Cossu Organisational Coordination
Luca Moretuzzo Set-up co-ordination
Giorgio Pulvirenti Administrative coordination
Marina Comuzzi Economic Coordination
Alina Del Fabbro Bookshop e merchandising coordination
Luciano Bellet Accrochage
Martina Hrgic, Arteventi, Udine Contributor, social media management
We would like to thank
all those who contributed to the realisation of the exhibition.
Photographs: ©Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of
Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY.
