Vivian Maier

(New York, New York, 1926 - 2009, Oak Park, Illinois)

North America, American

Over a period of five decades, Vivian Maier created more than 100,000 negatives—many of them black-and-white Chicago street scenes—which she kept sequestered in boxes. In 2007, shortly before her death, her possessions were auctioned off because she was unable to pay the rent on her storage units. A young realtor named John Maloof purchased one of the lots. After several months, the extraordinary quality of the images led him to scan and post a few of them in an online photography forum. Since then, Maier has come to be regarded as an important American street photographer, and her work is now prominently represented in museum collections and galleries. Maier was born in the Bronx to a French mother and an Austrian father but spent most of her childhood in France with her mother. Traveling alone in 1951, Maier left the French port of Le Havre for New York where she began working as a nanny. In 1956, she moved to Chicago’s North Shore and worked as a nanny for the Gensburg family, who employed her until 1972. During this period, Maier transformed her private bathroom into a dark room and her work began to flourish, albeit in private. During her time off, Maier wandered the streets of Chicago photographing children and the elderly, as well as the poor and the homeless. According to those who knew her, she was privacy-obsessed, eccentric, unabashedly intellectual and deeply concerned with the fate of social outcasts. In 1972, after she left the Gensburgs, Maier began moving from family to family and no longer had access to a dark room. During this period, she began to experiment with color photography and to create more abstract compositions, but her film sat in boxes undeveloped. During the 1980s, she entered a prolonged period of financial instability, and in the1990s she moved into a low-rent apartment and was forced to place most of her possessions in storage. In 2007, her photographic work was auctioned off along with her other possessions. Two years later, she died in a Chicago nursing home, her work on the verge of discovery.

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