More than ten years after becoming the first European gallery to present Vivian Maier’s work, Les Douches la Galerie dedicates a new exhibition—the sixth—to the American photographer, marking the centenary of her birth. Since the Musée du Luxembourg retrospective in 2022, no exhibition devoted to Maier has been held in Paris. This presentation invites viewers to move beyond the initial “discovery effect” and to engage with the density and complexity of a corpus now fully embedded in the history of 20th-century photography.

As early as 2013, even before the release of the documentary Finding Vivian Maier, Les Douches la Galerie chose to exhibit her photographs, convinced of the intrinsic strength of a body of work that was still largely unknown at the time. Since then, the gallery has continuously accompanied its gradual rediscovery through several landmark exhibitions—notably Self-portraits (2015) and Color works (2019)—exploring the different territories of her practice: New York black-and-white photography of the 1950s, the emergence of color in Chicago, her persistent use of self-portraiture, and the singular attention she paid to marginal figures, ordinary gestures, and the almost imperceptible details of urban life.

Rue Vivian Maier does not seek synthesis or exhaustiveness. Instead, the exhibition proposes a free circulation between iconic images and rarer photographs, between recognizable motifs and more restrained, quieter forms. It brings together fleetingly captured faces and the sometimes sharp acuity of Maier’s gaze, while also revealing a more contemplative dimension: plays of shadow, architectural fragments, and pared-down compositions in which light becomes a subject in its own right.

Distanced from biographical narratives, the exhibition affirms the formal modernity and deep coherence of Vivian Maier’s work—a photography attentive to the rhythms of the city and to the fractures of everyday life, which continue to reveal new layers of meaning and sensitivity.