There's no need to forage outside of Waltham for your weekly dose of art, as Brandeis' Women's Studies Research Center brings stunningly simple, yet beautifully composed, photographs by Vivian Maier to the Waltham community. The exhibition, entitled Vivian Maier: A Woman's Lens, showcases poignant black and white street photography of Chicago and New York from the 1950s and '60s.

Working as a nanny in New York during the '50s, Maier purchased a Rolleiflex, the camera that would soon become integral to her iconic style. The German camera was one of the most cutting-edge cameras of the time and enabled Maier to capture the intimacies of street style-from the tender embraces and touches of couples to the precocious children whose stances already revealed the fully formed individual within.

Maier's body of work consists of more than 150,000 black-and-white photographs that had been hiding from the public in storage lockers until John Maloof, Chicago real estate agent and local historian, found the negatives. This exhibit is the first one in the Greater Boston area of the photographer whose life story and talent is still largely undiscovered. And though Maier's work has only just recently, in the last four or five years, been introduced to the public eye, her work has already been compared to the likes of Lisette Model, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Andre Kert??sz.

The exhibition consists of fewer than 50 black and white photographs whose subjects are not just people but the very street itself. Through Maier's gentle hand and discerning eye, the audience can see how humans and individuals not only interact, but also how they are changed by the landscape of the street. In an untitled photograph, one man humorously dozes off with his face cupped in the palm of his hand inside a street-side newspaper stand, which is covered in faces; a snippet of Audrey Hepburn and other images of 1954 America can be discerned among the publications.

Because of Maier's experience as a nanny in New York City, children are a huge component of the exhibition. However, these are not the prim and proper, sweet images of children worthy of a family's holiday cards. Instead, children are captured in instances of pure, unadulterated emotion. They are in touch with the rollercoaster ride of their feelings as tears stream down their faces, which are scrunched with anguish. But in contrast to these images, Maier was also fond of capturing the children whose aura and unique magnetism radiated from the tilt of their head, the crossing of their arms and the intensity of their gaze.

The most endearing aspect of the exhibition are the six photographs displayed together, which showcase such beautifully simple and unassuming moments of tender love.

In one untitled image, a close up reveals a man and a woman standing side-by-side, their hands ever-so-gently clasped. Maier has angled and cropped the photograph so the eye of the artist is drawn to the hands of the couple, as we are unable to see the full length of the bodies. Two of the images, both untitled, capture scenes of train travel and they highlight the intimacies of love as a man and a woman morph their bodies together, and as an elderly woman rests her head on the shoulder of her husband. 

The show is also sprinkled with Maier's unobtrusive self-portraits. Simply posing before the glass windows of store shops or the found mirrors on the street, Maier is unpretentious, yet equally mysterious, as she rarely smiles in her photographs. She presents herself as a pleasant, but perhaps lonely individual whose decisive eye captured the everyday moments of a time that was conditional on the events of 1950s America.

Standing before the exhibition, one is forced to consider not only how the street changes and alters our very existence, but also asks how a woman's eye presents a story that may have been left unrecorded. The exhibition will run until Dec. 18 at the Women's Studies Research Center.