Vivian Maier: Unseen Work is on view at Fotografiska through September 29.
You don’t have to be a noticer to be a good street photographer. William Eggleston is much more a composer than a noticer; Bruce Gilden is a portraitist; André Kertész was a sorcerer and, to borrow a phrase from Saul Bellow, a heavy-water brain, but not a noticer. But it sure doesn’t hurt. Noticing is what distinguishes art from anonymity, what allowed Vivian Maier to capture Barthes’s “fifth type of surprise: the trouvaille or lucky find,” which isn’t really a matter of luck but of knowing how to look. She had an eye for faces. She quite often went for plain ones, though a new retrospective at Fotografiska would lead you to believe she also had a thing for the grizzled, the world-worked. There are several images of the backs of heads, reminiscent of the ones produced by Yang-Yang, the young amateur photographer in Edward Yang’s Yi Yi (2000). “You can’t see it for yourself, so I’m helping you,” Yang-Yang says to one of his subjects. It’s not a stretch to imagine Maier…