In looking at those photographs, it’s almost as if she’s attempting to understand the genre in a new format-that 35-millimeter rectangle-with blur and grain appearing in her work in ways they hadn’t previously. Given that, it’s curious that she would have shot so much of it. It’s clear, too, that Maier favored black-and-white film at the time, given not just the relatively small amount of color film she shot in comparison, but the extreme slowness of early Kodachrome film that made its use especially risky.

Maier preferred to be as invisible as possible, so this becomes an unusual choice, even though we can see in her self-portraits from the time that the camera was quite small. While the Rolleiflex is a camera one looks down into at usually waist- or chest-level, leaving a greater chance of relative invisibility to the subject, the 35-millimeter camera, of course, is held in front of the face, drawing more attention to the presence of the camera. It’s not clear why Maier transitioned formats, but the change did significantly alter her street photography. In The Color Work, we also see Maier transition from her now-famed Rolleiflex to a 35-millimeter camera. Westerbeck writes in The Color Work that he would be shocked if Maier didn’t see it, given how her work is very much inspired by Arbus: “I’ll go on record now saying that when an account of books is finally available, one of them will turn out to be the slim, paperbound Arbus catalog that Szarkowski published in 1972.” She also would have been able to view another iconic MoMA photography exhibition, 1972’s worldwide-sensation retrospective of Diane Arbus’s work, when it went on tour to the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago. Looking at the images, we begin to unravel the questions we still have about her work and her life, some of which include who her influences were as a photographer, why she changed her shooting style, what informed her choice of subject, and if factors from her personal life affected the work she made.

Selections from these rolls now appear in the first monograph of her color photography, Vivian Maier: The Color Work (2018). This was largely due to legal disputes raised about copyright ownership between Maloof and her estate, which were settled in 2016, allowing him to process Maier’s color film. But he hadn’t yet processed her color film, of which there were 700 undeveloped rolls as well as 40,000 Ektachrome slides, and which were mostly made during the last 30 years of her life, often considered her most mysterious. Maloof kindled Maier’s posthumous fame and owned the bulk of her archive.

This is the work he showed in Chicago that quickly infiltrated the consciousness of both the art world and mainstream culture-even more so following his Oscar-nominated documentary in 2014, Finding Vivian Maier.

Vivian maier photography