From September 7, 2023, to January 28, 2024, Palazzo Pallavicini hosted the extraordinary exhibition “Vivian Maier – Anthology” in its stunning Renaissance rooms. The exhibition featured nearly 150 original photographs and Super 8mm films by one of the most beloved and acclaimed photographers of this century.
Organized and curated by Chiara Campagnoli, Deborah Petroni, and Rubens Fogacci of Pallavicini srl, with curatorial oversight by Anne Morin of DiChroma Photography, the exhibit drew from the Maloof Collection and the Howard Greenberg Gallery in New York.
The curator performed a meticulous selection from the thousands of available photographs of Vivian Maier; the exhibition included 111 black-and-white photos and a beautiful section of 35 color photos, divided into six sections for an anthology of unprecedented completeness in Bologna.
Another major highlight in Bologna was the Super 8mm footage, allowing viewers to follow Vivian Maier’s perspective. Vivian Maier began filming street scenes, events, and places as early as 1960. She filmed everything that led to a photographic image: observing, intuitively focusing on a subject, and then following it. She zoomed in to get close from a distance, concentrating on a posture or detail, such as the legs or hands of people in a crowd. The film served both as a documentary—showing an arrest or tornado damage—and as a contemplative work, such as the strange procession of sheep headed to Chicago’s slaughterhouses.