Anne Morin on Vivian Maier

The editor of a new book of Maier’s work tells Niall Hampton why Maier is one of the greats of photography

- Niall Hampton

First published in France in 2021, to coincide with the ‘Vivian Maier’ exhibition at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris, an English edition of Vivian Maier has just gone on sale in the UK and USA. Edited by Anne Morin, the monograph runs to 256 pages and contains 243 photographs taken by Maier between the 1950s and the 1990s. A decade in the making, Vivian Maier can be seen as a definitive account of Maier’s work, and was produced in collaboration with the Estate of Vivian Maier, courtesy of the John Maloof Collection, and the Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York.

We talked to Anne Morin to discover more about the book, and to explore why the enigmatic figure of Vivian Maier has come to be considered one of the greats of late 20th-century photography.

When did you first become aware of Vivian Maier’s photography, and how?

As with every important story, it began with a coincidence. I was in New York City in October 2011 and had an appointment at the Howard Greenberg Gallery for a project with the American actress Jessica Lange, who is also a photographer. At the end of my meeting, the director of the gallery, Karen Marks, proposed to show me “something” – a new photographer who had just been integrated into the gallery. Her name was Vivian Maier, but they did not really know much about her. I saw a few pictures – six, eight, not many more. I was really impressed and said that we should pay tribute to her. This is how it all began.

And a decade on, has the definitive Maier oeuvre been established, or with 100-150,000 negatives extant, is there more to be discovered?