Artist: Vivian Maier (American, 1926–2009)

Title: At the Balaban & Katz United Artists Theater, Chicago, IL

Date: 1961, printed 2024

Dimensions: 12 x 12 in. (30 x 30 cm.)

Credit: Mary and Leigh Block Museum of Art, Northwestern University, Block Board of Advisors Endowment fund purchase, 2024.18.1 © 2026 Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York. All Rights Reserved.

Beneath the brightly illuminated marquee of Chicago’s United Artists Theater,[1] a small group of people is set against the restless throng of moviegoers and passersby. Two women with poised bearing stands out among the figures that anchor the image’s foreground. Rendered with the candidness and precision that characterized street photography at midcentury, the ordinary encounter is transformed into an image of metropolitan elegance. In this photograph by Vivian Maier, the glamour usually reserved for movie stars extends onto the sidewalk, momentarily enveloping the women whose profiles seem to face one another across the picture plane. For decades, movie theaters like the one featured in At the Balaban & Katz United Artists Theater drew audiences from across Chicago, offering experiences that ranged from neighborhood entertainment to first-run Hollywood premieres. Countless moviegoers—workers, students, immigrants, families, and devoted cinephiles like Maier herself—shared these sites where, under the flickering glow of the overhang’s bulbs, even anonymous pedestrians could temporarily inhabit the glossy aura of cinema.

Sometimes identified as “a visual omnivore,”[2] Maier had a widely documented fascination with cinema. Allured by the endless spectacle of Chicago’s long-standing entertainment district, she regularly commuted from Highland Park on the city’s North Shore, where she lived and worked, to the Loop, where she photographed movie premieres, actors on the street, theatrical events, and even the cinema screen from her seat in the audience. When intent on securing a shot, she could be remarkably determined, approaching the scene with the fearlessness of a paparazzo on assignment—just a couple years before, she had managed to get a very close shot of Cary Grant in Chicago during the filming of Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest (1957). The film featured on the theater’s marquee in Maier’s photo, Back Street,[3] had a much-publicized “glittering world premiere” at the United Artists Theater in Chicago on October 11, 1961.[4] The event included a parade with the film’s stars, making it very likely that Maier was photographing the theater surroundings that same day. As her photo here demonstrates, she devoted the same inquisitive interest to anonymous city dwellers. 

Maier’s practice emerged within an image culture that increasingly encouraged personal photographic pursuits and elevated the street as a privileged yet widely accessible site of artistic observation. Her work demonstrates a self-taught command of the visual language of postwar street photography, and her sustained engagement with the streetscapes of cities like Chicago and New York reflects an affinity of the medium towards the modern metropolis. Beyond this body of work, for which she is now internationally acclaimed, she also assembled an expansive photographic corpus of billboards, newspapers, and posters that reveals a life-long investment in the media culture of her time. She was particularly drawn to cinema and to the urban life animated by movie theaters and their immediate surroundings, which she recorded with a remarkable sensitivity to the ways in which they brought together people from different backgrounds and reflected the changing cityscape. Pedestrians hurrying and gathering in front of theater marquees recur throughout Maier’s oeuvre alongside men sleeping in public spaces and women wearing elaborate attire, motifs that frequently captured her interest. This fascination with the cinematic culture of her time extended beyond still photography: in her experiments in filmmaking—an aspect of her practice that remains comparatively understudied—she also often captured the urban fabric surrounding Chicago’s downtown movie theaters.[5]

Yet, the balanced composition and fleeting image of civic coexistence in At the Balaban & Katz United Artists Theater remain at odds with the city’s patterns of racial and spatial segregation. Though often imagined as a democratic space of mass entertainment, the movie palace’s promise of cultural integration remained uneven within Chicago’s deeply segregated social order.[6] Against this backdrop, Maier’s photograph acquires an added historical resonance. Its portrayal of a shared urban space gestures towards the everyday experiences through which the challenges and opportunities of urban modernity are continually negotiated.

Though now circulating globally and held in collections worldwide, Maier’s photographs remain rooted in the city that deeply shaped her artistic practice. She spent most of her adult life in the Chicago area and, during her final years lived only a few miles from Northwestern University. Now part of The Block’s collection, At the Balaban & Katz United Artists Theater places one of Maier’s compelling Chicago photographs within the broader metropolitan context from which it emerged, offering a layered record of everyday life in midcentury Chicago.

– Contributed by Eduardo Bello, 2025–2026 Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellow

References

Bannos, Pamela. Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife. The University of Chicago Press, 2017.

Morin, Anne, Christa Blümlinger, and Ann Marks. Vivian Maier. London: Thames & Hudson, 2022.

Motion Picture Exhibitor, vol. 37, no. 2, November 7, 1956.

Rooney, Kathleen. “Review of Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife, by Pamela Bannos.” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2017.

Stewart, Jacqueline. Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.

Footnotes

[1] Though not fully shown in the photograph, the new marquee of the United Artists Theater was remarkably spectacular for its time and location. The November 1956 issue of the trade journal Motion Picture Exhibitor described it as “one of the largest in the last 25 years,” weighing more than 60 tons and requiring more than 8,000 feet of neon tubing and 10,000 incandescent bulbs.

[2] This is how Maier is described in one of the oral-history testimonies that Pamela Bannos recollects in her biography of the photographer. The qualifier was later taken up by Kathleen Rooney in her review of Bannos’s book in the Chicago Tribune.

[3] Back Street is a cinematic adaptation of Fanny Hurst’s popular romance novel. Hurst’s other famous novel, Imitation of Life (1933), and its influential film adaptations of 1934 and 1959 became key works in the history of Black spectatorship in the United States. Like Douglas Sirk’s 1959 remake of Imitation of Life, the 1961 remake of Back Street was a postwar Hollywood revamp produced by Ross Hunter, whose promotional campaigns often relied on these displays of glamour and spectacle.

[4] From film reel publicizing the premiere: https://youtu.be/9o9bb9aQXfI?si=it8EeJBNCq8MhNvA.

[5] For more on Vivian Maier’s cinematic experiments, see Christa Blümlinger, “Glances and Moving Images,” in Anne Morin, Christa Blümlinger, and Ann Marks, Vivian Maier, London, Thames & Hudson, 2022, pp. 22-31.

[6] At the same time, Black neighborhood theaters in Chicago became important sites for community, leisure, and cultural affirmation, and Black communities across the country forged meaningful ways of participating in American mass culture on their own terms. For more on Chicago’s Black Belt movie theaters as sites of urban leisure and cultural and social agency, see Jacqueline Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, Berkeley, University of California Press, 2005.