Vivian Maier American, 1926-2009

Vivian Maier photographed the streets of Chicago and New York relentlessly, yet her talent remained unknown throughout her lifetime. A professional nanny, she devoted every spare moment to wandering the streets with her Rolleiflex around her neck, casting a keen eye on the human experience of urban life and producing striking self-portraits. She never showed her photographs to anyone. Her posthumous discovery, a true American story, revealed one of the most remarkable talents in street photography.

In 2007, John Maloof discovered a lot at a Chicago auction house containing thousands of negatives, along with undeveloped film rolls and a number of prints. His subsequent research revealed that this was only part of a much larger body of work, which he gradually assembled by acquiring numerous boxes of negatives, film rolls, and documents. His online searches initially proved fruitless, until 2009, when an obituary published in the Chicago Tribune announced that Vivian Maier had died just days earlier, at the age of 83.

Vivian Maier was born in the Bronx in 1926 to an Austro-Hungarian father and a French mother. She spent her childhood with her mother, between France and the United States. It appears that her mother’s friend, Jeanne Bertrand, a portrait photographer, introduced her to photography. Maier took her first photographs in France around 1949, using a Kodak Brownie, a simple camera designed for amateur photographers.

She returned to the United States in 1951 and began working as a nanny for a family in Southampton, on the outskirts of New York City. In 1952, she purchased a Rolleiflex, a medium-format camera widely used by photographers at the time. Photography gradually became an increasingly important part of her life.

After moving from New York to Chicago in 1956, she began working for the Gensburg family. She cared for their three children and used their bathroom as a darkroom to develop her film. This marked the beginning of the most prolific period of her photographic career.

When she left the Gensburg family seventeen years later, Maier could no longer develop her own film. Moving from one household to another, she accumulated an ever-growing number of undeveloped rolls and unprinted photographs. She continued photographing until the late 1990s, also experimenting with colour. As her financial difficulties intensified, these rolls, too, remained undeveloped. She stored her negatives, film rolls, and documents in a storage unit.

In the early 2000s, the Gensburg children took her under their care and provided her with a small studio apartment. Her belongings were forgotten until 2007, when they were put up for auction due to unpaid storage fees, without her knowledge. Vivian Maier died in 2009 from complications following a fall.

John Maloof catalogued part of her work, meticulously reconstructing an extensive body of approximately 143,000 negatives, alongside films and audio recordings. Her photographs have since been exhibited in numerous countries.

The book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer was published in 2011, followed by Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits in 2013 and Vivian Maier: The Color Work in 2018. The documentary film Finding Vivian Maier, directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2015.