One of Queerguru’s favorite documentaries of all time is Finding Vivian Maier (2013). (SEE HERE)  It’s the story of how graduate student John Maloof unwittingly uncovered a photographic treasure trove of an unknown photographer who had produced some of the very best street images from the 1950’s to the late 1990’s.  Vivian Maier had been a children’s nanny for years both in Chicago and New Year and this unassuming and reclusive woman had been dragging her young charges out on the streets so she could practice her art.

The discovery of her work after her death was not only a shock to the photography community but also to her past employers who had no idea of how she had prolifically practised her enormous talent right under their noses.

The documentary would go on to be nominated for an Academy Award and Maloff started the serious work on cataloguing all of Maiers’ very extensive body of work. 

Now the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York has a new exhibition  Allen Ginsberg and Vivian Maier: Notes from the Margins showing her work alongside that of Ginsberg. It brings together Ginsberg’s poetic and photographic sensibility with Maier’s extraordinary street photography; the exhibition explores how each transformed everyday experience into a powerful record of memory, observation, and human presence.

Ginsberg is primarily known as a great American poet, the figurehead of the Beat Generation (the post-World War ll American literary and social movement centered in New York and San Francisco) But from the early 1950s to about 1964, he regularly used an inexpensive camera to take snapshots of his now-famous friends, including the writers Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Neal Cassady. Almost all are affectionate, straightforward portraits. Many have a subtly playful spirit, and some carry Ginsberg’s annotations handwritten on prints. Soon after making these pictures, Ginsberg lost the camera he’d been using, and it would be another 20 years before he would return to photography.

This rather genius  pairing with Maier  features approximately 80 modern and vintage prints, along with Maier’s experimental film footage and a film of Ginsberg reciting his poem “Howl.” Self-portraits and the urban landscape are a recurring thread through the exhibition. Together, Ginsberg’s and Maier’s work reveals two singular modes of looking: one public and outspoken, the other private and elusive.