Vivian Maier was an American nanny with a hidden passion: photography. She loved to walk the streets of Chicago – where she spent most of her life – with her camera, and capture spontaneous moments of real life. Kids, animals or abandoned objects were some of the subjects that caught her eye.
Who was Vivian Maier
A Mystery
We have little information about Vivian Maier’s life. She was born in New York in 1926 and was of French and Austro-Hungarian descent. She had a difficult childhood: her father was an alcoholic, her brother was institutionalised, and the only person who took care of her was her French grandmother. After spending her youth in France, she moved back to the States, where she worked for wealthy families as a nanny. She always lived in the shadows, and never got married. According to the families she worked for, she was a reserved, eccentric person. Photography was her form of expression.
Ordinary People
Although the amateur photographer lived in upper-class neighbourhoods, she preferred to take pictures of common people: society’s outsiders, the poor, the elderly, ‘invisible’ people just like her. In the 1950s she bought a reflex camera and used black and white rolls. Later she switched to colour film. She also left a lot of self-portraits behind, and a huge collection of mementos: newspapers, tickets and objects of all sorts.
A Secret Archive
Despite being a prolific street photographer, Maier’s pictures were discovered only recently and by chance. Her personal belongings – with over one thousand negatives – were stored in a storage locker. In 2007, a historian named John Maloof was looking for archive pictures while writing a book about Chicago. He ended up buying Maier’s collection at an auction.
Discovery
Most of the film rolls were undeveloped, so it took a while for him to look at the pictures and realise he had discovered a real treasure. Maloof found the photographer’s name written on an envelope, and did some research online. But unfortunately Maier had passed away only a couple of days before – alone and in poverty. After years of archiving, Maloof dedicated a documentary film to this talented and mysterious photographer called Finding Vivian Maier (2013).
Final Acclaim
Today, almost all Maier’s archive has been reconstructed and catalogued. Her pictures are shown in museums and galleries all over the world. She is hailed by both critics and the general public alike as one of the 20th-century’s greatest photographers.
