A double exhibition co-organised by the Musée de Pont-Aven and the Musée des Beaux-arts de Quimper: Self-portraits on the one hand and street photography on the other: Two exhibitions presenting the photographic work of Vivian Maier (1926–2009). She worked as a housekeeper in New York and then in Chicago in the early 1950s for more than four decades. A whole life that went unnoticed until the recent discovery, in 2007, of her photographic corpus: an important, imposing, dense body of work, made up of more than 120,000 negatives, super 8 and 16mm films, various recordings, scattered photographs, and a multitude of undeveloped films. This passion, which has overflowed her, has elevated her to the rank of the greatest emblematic photographers of street photography, and she figures in the history of photography alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand.

The whole point of this double exhibition is to allow visitors to immerse themselves in this singular and astonishing work, to grasp the prior knowledge, the keys to reading and interpreting this major figure of 20th century photography. Vivian Maier embraces all subjects and all genres: thousands of faces of elderly women, babies, children or prams, such as a creation as a work of reparation, writes G. Josse, but also still lives, landscapes, street scenes, with the marginalized, the excluded, the damaged. Not forgetting, above all, her self-portraits, like a troubling presence-absence, a metaphor for her own existence. These themes allow us to take visitors on an incredible journey of immersion.

Opening

February 2022

Project management

Explosition

Interventions

Conception et réalisation de la scénographie

Projet sponsor

Musée de Pont Aven & Musée des Beaux Arts de Quimper

Collaborators

RéalisationsEurope (Conception lumière)
Paula Mutel (Conception graphique)
Animaviva (conception audiovisuelle)
MPI (agencement et graphisme)

Project location

Musée de Pont Aven et Musée des Beaux Arts de Quimper

Area

600 m²

Budget

€73,000