Vivian Maier

Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer whose work was discovered and recognized after her death.

She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed around the world.

During her lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of her negatives were never developed.

She was born in New York City in 1926, the daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier (also known as Wilhelm).

Several times during her childhood she moved between the U.S. and France, living with her mother in the alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near her mother's relatives.

Her father seems to have left the family temporarily for unknown reasons by 1930.

In the 1930 Census, the head of the household was listed as Jeanne Bertrand, a successful photographer who knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

When Maier was 4, she and her mother moved to the Bronx with Bertrand.

In 1935, Vivian and her mother were living in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur; three years later, they returned to New York.

In the 1940 Census, Charles, Maria, Vivian and Charles Jr were listed as living in New York, where the father worked as a steam engineer.

In 1951, aged 25, Maier moved from France to New York, where she worked in a sweatshop.

She moved to the Chicago's North Shore area in 1956, where she worked primarily as a nanny and carer for the next 40 years.

In her first 17 years in Chicago, Maier worked as a nanny for two families: the Gensburgs from 1956 to 1972, and the Raymonds from 1967 to 1973.

Lane Gensburg later said of Maier, "She was like a real, live Mary Poppins," and said she never talked down to kids and was determined to show them the world outside their affluent suburb.

The families who employed her described her as very private and reported that she spent her days off walking the streets of Chicago and taking photographs, usually with a Rolleiflex camera.

She would frequently take the young children in her care with her into the center of Chicago when she took her photographs.

Occasionally they accompanied her to the rougher, run-down areas of Chicago, and, on one occasion, the stock yards, where there were bodies of dead sheep.

In 1959 and 1960, Maier embarked on a solo trip around the world, taking pictures in Los Angeles, Philippines, Thailand, Hong Kong, Vietnam, Malaysia, Singapore, India, Yemen, Egypt, Greece, Lebanon, Syria, Turkey, Italy, France, and Switzerland.

The trip was probably financed by the sale of a family farm in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur.

For a brief period in the 1970s, Maier worked as a housekeeper for talk-show host Phil Donahue.

She kept her belongings at her employers'; at one residence, she had 200 boxes of materials.

Most contained photographs or negatives, but Maier also collected newspapers; in at least one instance, it involved "shoulder-high piles."

She also recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with people she photographed.

The Gensburg brothers, whom Maier had looked after as children, tried to help her as she became destitute in old age.

When she was about to be evicted from a downmarket apartment in the suburb of Cicero, the Gensburg brothers arranged for her to live in a better apartment on Sheridan Road in the Rogers Park area of Chicago.

A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier's photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier's prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time.

In 2007, two years before she died, Maier failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago's North Side.

As a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8 mm film were auctioned.

Three photo collectors bought parts of her work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow.

Maier's photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response.

In November 2008, Maier fell on the ice and hit her head.

She was taken to a hospital but failed to recover.

In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier's photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went viral, with thousands of people expressing interest.

Maier's work subsequently attracted critical acclaim, and since then, Maier's photographs have been exhibited around the world.

In January 2009, she was transported to a nursing home in the Chicago suburbs, where she died on April 2009.

Her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films, including the film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards.

Many details of Maier's life remain unknown.

In the documentary films Finding Vivian Maier (2013) and Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures / The Vivian Maier Mystery (2013), interviews with Maier's employers and their children suggest that Maier presented herself to others in multiple ways, with various accents, names, life details, and that with some children, she had been inspiring and positive, while with others she could be frightening and abusive.

John Maloof, curator of some of Maier's photographs, summarized the way the children she nannied would later describe her:

"She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved ... She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone."