Vivian Maier, the Author’s Gaze and the Social Gaze

The recent discovery of the Vivian Maier photographic archive of over 150,000 images of New York and Chicago in the fifties, sixties and seventies of the twentieth century, reveals the street life of American modernity. This immense Atlas given tu us by a woman who lived and died in obscurity, allows us to perform a Benjaminian reflection on a time in the past that manifests itself as the germ of our recent catastrophe. Maier’s photography is not the “pretext” to undertake this task, but the forensic evidence of a street detective, as Benjamin conceived photography in the late nineteenth century