Vivian Maier, American photographer

In this episode of 'Why They Put That in a Museum,' hosts Beth Bacon and Sarah Lees discuss the unusual story of Vivian Meier, an unknown nanny whose extraordinary street photography was discovered by chance in an unclaimed storage locker. They discuss the unique and enigmatic nature of her photographs and the very unusual way her body of work came to be known. In fact, none of Meier’s powerful and thought-provoking photos are on display in traditional museums. Sarah and Beth go on to explore broader questions about the definition and purpose of museums. Tune in to discover why Vivian Meier's photography is a hidden gem waiting to be explored.

Suggested Links

https://www.vivianmaier.com/

https://newyork.fotografiska.com/en/exhibitions/vivian-maier

Timeline

00:00 Introduction to the Podcast

01:50 Today's Subject: Vivian Meyer

02:21 The Discovery of Vivian Meyer's Work

05:15 Analyzing Vivian Meier's Photography

11:33 The Debate: Should Meier's Work Be in a Museum?

20:47 The Purpose of Museums

22:34 Conclusion 

Rate & Review  on Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/whyd-they-put-that-in-a-museum/id1792614250

© 2025 Why'd They Put That In A Museum podcast hosts Beth Bacon and Sarah Lees.

Transcript

Transcript Vivian Maier  in podcast “Why They Put That in a Museum?”

Beth Bacon:  Hello. I am Beth Bacon. 

Sarah Lees: And I'm Sarah Lees, and this is Why They Put That in a Museum?, the podcast where we explore objects found in museums. And what we're here to do is talk about art and objects and museums and what happens when you put them together and invite people in to look. 

Beth Bacon: You know, sometimes I walk through a gallery and I wonder why is this object here? So in this podcast, we're diving deep into the stories behind some of the artifacts that we find kind of interesting.

Sarah Lees: Right, so for each episode, we'll start with one thing in one specific place, and then sort of wander off from there, um, exploring the thing and its history and the cultural ideas that surround it to see where they take us. And eventually, usually coming back to the original thing and then seeing if it looks or feels different as a result of what we have discovered.

Beth Bacon: It's amazing how different an object seems once you know the unexpected reasons these objects came to be on display. 

Sarah Lees:  We'll  always mention where the real object actually lives. And provide a link to it when we can so you can at least call up an image, while you listen or maybe afterwards. Uh, and then hopefully you can go see it in person because I have to say, There is no substitute for the in-person experience. Um, especially nowadays when you can find images of everything that exists in the world and lots of stuff that doesn't actually exist. We definitely recommend making the effort to see the art or the object or, um, whatever it is in the museum in person if you can. 

Beth Bacon: Well, Sarah, let's just get talking. What is the subject today? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, so today we are talking about several photographs by Vivian Maier, whose name you may have heard of. There's quite a story there. Uh, in fact, just like the Dolley Madison daguerreotype, Maier's work was almost lost. Um, and I should mention too that these photographs are not technically in a museum.

Beth Bacon: Not in a museum. Why? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, it essentially comes down to a story of finders keepers. 

BethL Ooh, I am intrigued.

Sarah Lees:  All right, let's get to it. I think both of us probably first heard of her thanks to, a documentary that came out in 2013 she was literally unknown until this point. 

Beth Bacon: Can we, talk about the name of that documentary in case anyone wants to see it? 

Sarah Lees: Yes, excellent question. It is called Finding Vivian Maier. 

Beth Bacon: Maier is spelled M E I, no, M A I E R.

Sarah Lees: Vivian Maier. M A I. Finding Vivian Maier.

Beth Bacon: Finding is a really important word in that video. 

Sarah Lees: Well, absolutely. Because, um, In fact, Vivian Maier was not a professional photographer. She made her living mostly as a nanny, um, working in, I think, New York and Chicago. Um, and during her free time, she took thousands and thousands of photographs. Um, because as we talked about in an earlier discussion, kind of any time. So you could be a nanny, you know, during your work hours and take photographs during your off time. 

Beht Bacon: Um, and she was, um, taking these pictures in the 1950s. Is that correct?

Sarah Lees: In the 50s.

Sarah Lees:  Yeah. And apparently up until, um, I think the 1990s. So just for years and years, she just kept taking photographs. Um, and because she was a nanny, um, she never made a ton of money. And also, because she was a live-in nanny, once she got a bit older and maybe wasn't working so much, she sometimes didn't have a place to live. And what she did with these thousands of photographs and negatives was put them into a storage locker. So, uh, at a certain point, she was not able to pay rent on the storage locker, which means that it, uh, went to auction. Basically the contents of that storage space were sold off. And that is where the story, um, gets more interesting because, uh, an amateur historian and real estate agent named John Maloof Bought some of these boxes of photographs, kind of just on speculation. Like he didn't really know what they were. Nobody knew what they were. Um, he just decided to buy them because he was interested. Um, and he became fascinated by all these photos that he found in these boxes. And he didn't actually figure out the photographer's name for two years. It had been two years after buying this stuff to find, maybe one of the order slips that you fill out when you're getting your photos developed, which is how she did it. So he finally found a name and managed to kind of reconstruct the identity of this person who is Vivian Maier. Um, he also, because all these boxes of her things were dispersed at auction, some of them went to different buyers. I think he managed to buy some of those ones back. Basically, John Maloof eventually owned almost all of Vivian Maier's work.

He then worked on analyzing it, learning more about her, promoting her work, and in fact, producing the documentary that we saw. His project was to bring this person's work, to a wider public 

Beth Bacon: this was a photographer who was taking, in my opinion, definitely museum quality photographs.There's another photographer who her work reminds me of, is Henri Cartier Bresson. 

Sarah Lees: Yes. 

Beth Bacon: Who's a French photographer. And he, he did street scene photography that was always really interesting and it was very geometrical and interesting to look at, but the subject matter and the people were always doing interesting and weird things on the streets.

And that is what Vivian Maier was so good at, like catching regular people on the street, just in a really elegant and balanced and interesting ways. But with maybe contrasting, colors, and most of this was black and white. But I think she did take some color. And, uh, you know, interesting expressions.

Beth Bacon:  There's one photograph that I remember of, like, a man and a woman, and, and the, both of the women are wearing fur coats, and I think they either have, like, the same color fur coat or opposite color fur coat, and it's just, like, really interesting contrasts in all of her pictures. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, absolutely. They tell a story.

Beth Bacon: They're not just, oh, this is a picture of something. They're so interestingly composed. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, absolutely. Some of them are of, you know, children playing in the street. There's one that I came across that is, shows three men. One of them is a guy in a, uh, like a suit. Then there's a policeman and they're dragging a third guy who's wearing a three piece suit and like a fedora across the street, like almost dragging him horizontally. And the date of the picture is, like, Christmas Eve 1954 or something, you know. 

Beth Bacon: You're like, what? What was happening? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, they totally tell the story. She also did quite a number of self portraits, right? We were talking about this. And very often she did it using mirrors in a way that kind of breaks up her own image.

So, we were looking at one that shows Basically, she's looking into a shop window and the shop window sells mirrors. So there's this whole series of little hand mirrors in the window. And what you see in those mirrors, first of all, right in the middle, you see kind of literally, right, her face. Looking down at the viewfinder of her little, actually, I can't tell what kind of camera it is, but it's the kind where you get the viewfinders at the top of sort of a boxy camera.

Right. Um, Yeah. 

Beth Bacon: So, so she's holding the camera, like kind of at her abdomen, because that's the kind of camera where you, you hold it mid body and you look down into it and, and then the lens will, you know, take the picture straight ahead. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, exactly. So what we're seeing is, right. her face in the center of this composition and above that another mirror in the store is positioned so that see her hands and her camera and her purse taking the photograph.

Beth Bacon i don't think it has a name right do her pictures have names 

Sarah Lees: Like a title?

Beth Bacon: Yeah.

Sarah Lees: No, no. Well, here's the thing. She never showed them to anyone. She didn't intend for people to see her photographs, so she wouldn't have given it a title and Huh. 

Beth Bacon: So it's the artist who gives a piece a title? 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, basically. 

Beth Bacon: And if an artist doesn't title it, then it's untitled?

Sarah Lees: It's untitled and often if it does make it into a museum, let's say, you know, you could say untitled and then self portrait portrait by Vivian Maier or portrait of man in the street on Christmas Eve, you know, you wouldn't acknowledge that. The photographer who took the image didn't give it a title, but you're giving it a descriptive one in order to present it to people with a little bit more context, right? 

Beth Bacon: So this picture that we're talking about, I'm going to describe it a little bit more. It's, it's black and white and the background, you can tell you're looking in a shop window. The background is very dark. I mean, it's. And it's 7, 8 round mirrors. Some of them are like mirrors with a handle that you would hold up, and some of them sort of have a little stand. Maybe they're the kind of mirrors a woman would put on her vanity when she's using, putting on her makeup. And they're all sort of arranged in a You know, haphazard way, kind of haphazard way, but you can display and there's a piece of cloth on the surface there that's got a seam.

So it looks like somebody threw like an old tablecloth over, you know, a table. 

Sarah Lees: And I think you can see a bit of the street in the background, right? Reflected, you can see a reflection in the window of the sidewalk in the window. 

Beth Bacon: And yeah, so in the middle, you see her face. In one of the mirrors looking down, but then you see her body which would normally be below her face Below her head is above her head exactly and there's a camera and but really in the middle of it is this really ordinary 1950s handbag that she's holding.

And she's wearing gloves and like a big heavy overcoat. Yeah. And so like her coat is black, her purse is black, the camera's black, the tablecloth is black, but the mirrors are sort of bright. And they're all circles. It's just really interesting shapes. It's a really complex and interesting photograph.

Beth Bacon: It's making a statement about, like, your head and your body or not, like…

Sarah Lees: It's like the most disjointed and sort of unrevealing self portrait you can imagine, right? 

Beth Bacon: Although you can see her face. 

Sarah Lees: You can, but it's oblique, right? She's looking down, so you don't get a clear view of it. 

Beth Bacon: She actually looks kind of attractive, and she's wearing a big hat.

Yeah. Here's the weird thing. Oh, and in the mirror of her face, there's words. That are probably the words that were, like, on the window, maybe? I don't know, we can read them. But what we're looking at is, like, the mirror is looking at the back of those words on the window, right? So that's why they're the right way around.

Oh, yeah. Wow, so that's, like, backwards, forwards, to forwards again. Yeah. They're great. Uh, or forwards to backwards to forwards again. Yeah. 

Beth Bacon: And so the word above her head is corp, c o r p, which is kind of interesting because that kind of means body, right? 

Sarah Lees: Oh, good point. 

Beth Bacon: Yeah and then the other letters are, are something r O R S?

Sarah Lees: Yeah, so I'm thinking it says like, you know, Jones Corporation mirrors, right? Something like that. Oh, yes. Yep. That's the other half of the word mirrors. 

Beth Bacon: But yeah, so what you really see is corp, which to me is like corpse. 

Sarah Lees: So good. I didn't even think of that. That is so good. 

Beth Bacon: Yeah, I'm always looking as a writer.I'm always looking at like how the words are interplaying with the visuals. And so this is like, that's another element of, this is about a body. This is her body. We're looking at her body. But she saw it like no one else would see it.

And she, and she created something. Yeah, like she didn't move those mirrors around obviously they're in the store window but she managed to position herself so that it got just this view. of her hands and her head separately. I mean, it's so brilliant. 

Sarah Lees: I mean, so this, I mean, again, raises so many questions about this should be in a museum, right? 

Beth Bacon: You're right. It's the quality of the image is so fascinating. It's so deep. Yeah. It's infinitely analyzable. And it's just a cool, interesting thing to look at in terms of the colors and the shapes. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, but she would never have imagined that you and I would be sitting here discussing her photographs, right? That wasn't ever her intention. 

Beth Bacon: So, I mean, we can't tell what she would have imagined. Maybe she did. Maybe she went home and it was like, I'm going to be like, you know, the most famous artist of the 21st century. 

Sarah Lees: Um, but you know, she certainly didn't do anything to get herself there. 

Beth Bacon: Right. You could enter like a competition. You could send your photographs to some magazine if you didn't want to go for, you know, camera work or something. You know, there were so literally in her life she never like tried to show them? Apparently not. Nope. Um hmm. Because no one knew. Yeah. And what does that say? No one knew she was these photos.

Yeah. So what does that say, whether they should be in a museum. But the other thing that gets to, gets to me asking questions is that are they in fact in a museum?

Beth Baco Because ah, okay. So where are these pictures? 

Sarah Lees: Well, to my knowledge, the vast majority of all of Vivian Maier's photographs are owned by this guy, John Maloof. So I went looking in the databases, which can be imperfect, but they should reflect this. I looked through, the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum, the Eastman Museum, George Eastman invented Kodak photography, we can talk about that, Art Institute of Chicago, and the Getty in California, and none of them own. Photographs by Vivian Maier, because I think they are essentially all owned by John Maloof. Now, and

Beth Bacon: John Maloof is not interesting in selling them to a museum?

Sarah Lees: No, I mean, again, I don't know, but no, so, but he hasn't done it. Right. So we don't know anyone's intentions. But so Vivian Maier took all these amazing photos and never showed them to anyone.

John Maloof found them. Yes. And now he's got all, he's basically got all of them. Binders keepers. Binders keepers. And he's not interested in putting them in a museum. So what he hasn't done is his, he has created a website, VivianMaier. com So if you look for that, what you'll get to is John Maloof's website.

Where he is described as the owner and chief curator of the Malouf collection. And the only thing that the Malouf collection has is photographs by Vivian Maier. And again, nothing wrong with this, but what that means is, you know, what kind of organization or institution is presenting these photographs. And in fact, I only learned recently as I was working on developing this talk, that there's a show of her work in New York right now at a place called Fotografiska. And all the images are all contemporary prints, which is a whole other concept we don't need to get into right now. In other words, they weren't printed by Vivian Maier herself, just FYI., they're all owned by Don Maloof, he organized this show and is sending it around, making it available to museums, galleries, institutions, again, all good. And the place where it's being shown, Fotografiska, Grafiska, is a for profit art space.

Beht Bacon: So Fotografiska, it's, it's not an art. So I know that you can go and buy art at an art gallery that like, you know, it's, it's not an art gallery, like where you go and buy some, buy a piece of art, bring it home. And it's not an art gallery, like a museum that, you know, is endowed and the public can go to.  What is it?

Sarah Lees: It is a for-profit art space, it is a for-profit art space. One of the US is only for-profit art spaces. According to some of my research, the brand chairman and majority shareholder in the company stated that photography helps foster a cultural experience. Fotografiska also has, you know, a restaurant, uh, a bar, an event space, all things that museums also try to have. What they're aiming to present is the kind of immersive experience, right, where you can have an experience, basically, that's not just about art. The organization has five branches around the world. I think it initially started in Sweden. I think, there's one maybe in Seoul. I should be looking at their website and I'm making this up. So forgive me for getting it wrong, but it is designed to profit from cultural experiences and, you know, taking an exhibition like the Vivan Maier one, it benefits both of those parties, I guess, as well as the public, because we get to see her work. But when John Maloof creates an exhibition and sends it around, he's getting money from the venues to lend the objects. And then, of course, the venues have to charge money to the public in order to make a profit. Now, again, not super different from museums And I will say, museums also take these kinds of package shows. There are organizations that develop exhibitions, and then lots of museums will, you know, for a fee because producing an exhibition literally costs a lot of money, so you could, you know, pay a fee of some thousand number of dollars to bring an exhibition to your museum and put it on view. That happens all the time. There are no real issues with that. It is really a grey, complicated area. 

Beth Bacon: So it's like a museum, but it's a private organization, and it is trying to maximize its its profits. 

Sarah Lees: Yeah, whereas it's different from a museum because its mission is not necessarily to maximize its profits, but it needs to buy things, and it needs to charge people. Sure, which is why museums are not for profit, right? The motive, the purpose is not to make money. It is still nonetheless to try to support yourself as a museum from various sources, including memberships, you know, admissions. Usually the mission is to benefit the public, you know, to provide. Well, frankly, to provide art experiences as well. Again, the gray area is huge and deep and complicated. 

Beth Bacon: Yeah, and actually, it's making me think, this podcast is why'd they put that in a museum? And I think this question is why didn't they put that in a museum because in my opinion Vivian Maier’s photography is way up there. I mean, she would be in the top five photographers in my book of all time Okay, but she's not in any museum and she never wanted, she never made an effort in her own life to get in a museum. The person now who acquired all of her work or much of her work –  it's not technically a museum, but it's like a museum. And the only difference is sort of the mission, because his mission is more, hey, I want to let people see it, but I also want to run a business. Whereas a museum is like, hey, I want to let people see it, but any profits or proceeds go back into the organization and not into one person's stock account.

Sarah Lees: Yeah, that's, that's true. Definitely. Um, what else can I say? Uh, yeah, no, I mean, I think. Okay. John Maloo's goal is certainly to make Vivian Maier's work better known and to get people to see it, which is admirable. I mean, I think you're right. It should be seen. It's amazing photography. Maybe the whole apparatus of how that happens is not so important, right? Particularly now, when seeing an original object is… well, it's more complicated, right? We're so used to seeing things on screens. There is really truly a value in seeing a unique object or even multiple objects, like a photograph where the negative can be printed a number of times. I think there's still a value, a benefit. You gain the experience, since we're using that word so much, you know, of going to a place and seeing a real printed photograph rather than just sitting in your living room, like on a screen, I think is very different, right? That is a useful goal is to get people to see kind of the real thing, whatever real means.

Beth Bacon: Do you think that, Malouf…  like he has a website. And he packages these, uh, exhibitions. The website is free, right? You can go onto it and look at it for free. I've never seen any of these pictures in real life. I've only seen them either in the video, in, you know, the documentary and in articles and just in through Google. The question is like, museum, not museum, you know, showing people, uh, having other people like look at this art and making their own conclusions of it. One of the reasons I love Vivian Maier because I love the kind of art that invites the viewer to participate. Because they're so enigmatic. It's inviting you to make meaning out of it. And sometimes it's humorous, and sometimes it's tragic. And sometimes it's just like the happiness of looking at pattern. 

Sarah Lees: But they really pull you in. You're right. They, you want to either know more about what's going on, or more about the people in those images. They're really very engaging. 

Beth Bacon: There are just so many opposites that are involved in this story or somebody like contrast. 

Sarah Lees: And I think you also mentioned, I mean, anyway, we're also asking, like, what is the museum? Not just why did they put a thing in it? 

Beth Bacon: Okay, Sarah, I have a question for you, as a curator. Can you give us a little, like, history of museum? Like, what do you, what's the first museum? Like, who is the first person, was it Louis XIV? Or somebody who said the Louvre should be a museum? 

Sarah Lees: Okay, so this is a big question, and I need to be more prepared. I would say no, Louis XIV probably did have his own picture gallery. Okay. Uh, but I do not believe that he would have invited anyone other than, you know, his most select noble  men and women to see it. So I don't think that would count him as a museum. I think maybe we want to think more about Napoleon. So this would be around 1800 plus or minus. Because he, Napoleon, of course, rather famously took a lot of art from other countries that he conquered, brought it all to Paris, and placed it on view in the Louvre. At that point it was, it, you know, it wouldn't be open to anyone on everyone, I'm fairly sure, but it would be more widely available for somebody to walk in. And in that case it wasn't like a private, the King's picture picture gallery, it was. what we think of more as a museum at that point. 

Bth Bacon: That's a whole interesting thing unto itself to like, Oh yeah, I'm going to go invade a country for all of the things that are like, sort of, uncool about that. Steal the best artwork. Yeah, because I won. And then bring it back for the benefit of the people to see it. Hmm, like a museum itself is a very great institution. Like it allows people to come in and No matter what your walk of life is, you can, you can look at the art. 

Sarah Lees: Beth, we're getting into super deep water here. The people have written books and you know, you know, year long classes about the history of museums. 

Beth Bacon: All right, so we won't go there. We're going to go back to Vivian Maier. 

Sarah Lees: Okay. Yeah. Nothing else. 

Beth Bacon: But yeah, let's wrap up with Vivian Maier. So we don't, we can't say why they put that in a museum because she's not actually in a museum.

Sarah Lees: Well, again, depending on your definitions, but it's absolutely museum quality work. And why they put it on view is because It's fascinating, engaging, skillful, there's a great story behind it, and people should see her work. So I think that kind of answers the question, even as it opens up the pamphlet. 

Beth Bacon: Just so the listeners can know, what, how do you spell Fotografisca?

Sarah Lees: Oh, photografisca. It is. Fotografisca. Yeah. F O T O G R A F I S K A, Fotografiska. 

Beth Bacon: Fotografiska is a gallery. 

Sarah Lees: Show is open.

Beth Bacon: Not exactly a museum.

Sarah Lees:  Yep, September 29th. And then they're changing venues, by the way, they're moving to another building. 

Beth Bacon: But luckily we all have the internet and we can all look up Vivian Maier spelled with an I. In the middle of it,and we can look at her art that way, which is not a museum, and that is also, so this whole discussion about Vivian Maier maybe seems like it's been all over the place, but that's kind of what her art is like, and she really does question reality. In so many ways, and she's even questioning what is a museum with her art.

Sarah Lees: We never said this would be easy, right? 

Beth Bacon: Yeah, yeah, but that kind of endless fascination I think is all wrapped up in the life of Vivian Maier, the work of Vivian Maier, and what has happened to her works. Malouf found it. And hopefully if these listeners haven't found her, maybe you can go check her out.

Sarah Lees: Yeah, do that. Thanks for joining us on this episode of Why'd They Put That in a Museum. If you enjoyed it, please don't forget to subscribe, rate, and leave a review.

Beth Bacon: Tell your friends about this podcast. We love getting feedback and you might inspire us to feature your question in a future episode. 

Sarah Lees: Yep, and if you ever find yourself in a gallery or museum and start If you're wondering about some of these questions, just send us a message. We might feature that very object. 

Beth Bacon: Thanks for being here and please join us for our next episode of why do they put that in a museum?

Sarah Lees: See you then.