Vivian Maier’s life was a solitary one, her only relationships formed with the families she worked for as a nanny on Chicago’s North Shore. It was a posthumous twist of fate, however, that made her famous as a photographer.
Vivian lived under the radar her entire life. Born in New York City in 1926 to a French mother and Austrian father, she spent most of her childhood in France at her mother’s family farm.
In 1951, at the age of 25, Vivian moved to New York City, working in a sweatshop and learning English by going to movies. Five years later she moved to Chicago, and for 40 years she supported herself as a live-in nanny. When she wasn’t working she traveled, both locally and around the world.
Little did anyone know, she documented all of it.
Vivian carried a camera with her everywhere she went. She took pictures of people in the neighborhoods where she lived, at the beach along Lake Michigan, and self-portraits in mirrors, windows, even shiny car doors.
Chicago was a favorite destination, and Vivian would often bring the children she watched into the city with her, piling them onto the train or into the family station wagon to head to State Street. They walked around aimlessly as Vivian shot well-dressed ladies outside Marshall Field’s and down-on-their-luck men passed out in doorways along what was then known as Skid Row.
Anyone was a subject at any time, but Vivian kept every photograph to herself. She showed no one.
Vivian shot mostly in black and white, using a Rolleiflex camera (similar in look to a Brownie, or box, camera) that yielded more detailed images than a standard 35mm. She turned her bathrooms into dark rooms to develop her own film; when she didn’t have time, or lacked money to buy supplies, she stored the rolls of film in boxes to develop later.
It was those boxes that led to the outing of Vivian Maier, photographer
The year was 2007, and on Chicago’s northwest side a local auction house was setting up to sell the contents of an abandoned storage locker. John Maloof, who was writing a book about 1960s Chicago, was on the hunt for photos from the era, and on a whim purchased a box of negatives for $400. Two other collectors bought the remaining boxes.
Inside his box, Maloof found some 2,000 rolls of undeveloped black and white film; approximately 700 rolls of color 35mm film; stacks of slides; and dozens of prints and audio tapes.
Maloof wasn’t sure what he had (other than nothing for his book project) but the images he found were stunning. They captured street scenes and people with a documentary feel; they were artfully composed, rich in detail and of portrait quality.
He posted some 100 photos on a blog that garnered no attention. He then posted the images to Flickr, and Vivian Maier went viral.
As a collection, Vivian’s work chronicles American cities and society during the mid-20th century on par with renowned international street photographers. She is the focus of several books and documentary films, and her work is exhibited in galleries around the world.
“She showed the world of women and children in a way that is pretty much unprecedented,” writes photo critic Allan Sekula in Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows.
Still, we know very little of Vivian’s life. The families she worked for remember her as smart, very liberal and opinionated, yet she kept to herself. She stopped working in the 1990s, and as she grew older became destitute. Two brothers whose family she had worked for helped to support her, but in 2008 she fell on ice and hit her head. She never recovered, and died in April the following year.
Vivian never knew of her success.