“I’m a sort of spy.” Vivian Maier. Vivian Maier tirelessly photographed the streets of Chicago and New York, but her talent remained anonymous throughout her life. A nurse by profession, she took advantage of every free moment to roam the streets, her Rolleiflex around her neck, taking a sharp look at the human face of the city and leaving striking self-portraits. She didn’t show her photos to anyone, and her recent discovery, a true American romance, reveals one of street photography’s most brilliant photographers.
In 2007, John Maloof discovered a lot in a Chicago auction house containing thousands of negatives, as well as undeveloped film and a few prints. His research led him to discover that this lot was only part of a corpus that he assembled by buying back numerous boxes of negatives, film and documents. His internet searches remained fruitless until 2009, when an obituary was published in the Chicago Tribune, stating that Vivian Maier had died a few days earlier, aged 83.
Vivian Maier was born in 1926 in the Bronx to an Austro-Hungarian father and a French mother. She spent her childhood with her mother, between France and the United States. It seems that one of her mother’s friends, Jeanne Bertrand, a portrait photographer, introduced her to photography. Vivian Maier took her first pictures in France around 1949 with a Kodak Brownie, a simple camera designed for the amateur.
She returned to the United States in 1951. She became a nanny and worked for a family in Southampton, a suburb of New York. In 1952, she bought a Rolleiflex, a medium-format camera commonly used by photographers at the time. Photography became an increasingly important part of her life. Leaving New York for Chicago in 1956, she entered the service of the Gensburg family. There, she raised their three children and used her bathroom to develop her films. This was the beginning of Maier’s most prolific period.
When she left the Gensburgs seventeen years later, Maier was no longer able to develop her own films. Working from family to family, she took with her more and more undeveloped film and unprinted photos. She photographed until the late 1990s, experimenting with color. These films also remained undeveloped, as her financial worries became so great. She stored her negatives, films and documents in a storeroom. In the early 2000s, the Gensburg children took her in and housed her in a small studio. Her belongings were forgotten until, in 2007, they found their way into an auction for unpaid bills, without her knowledge. Vivian Maier died in 2009 after a fall.
Some of her work is catalogued by John Maloof, painstakingly reconstructing a vast corpus of 143,000 negatives, plus film and audio documents. Her photographs are exhibited in many countries. The book Vivian Maier: Street Photographer was published in 2011, followed in 2013 by Vivian Maier: Self-portraits, then by Vivian Maier: The Color Work in 2018. The film In Search of Vivian Maier, directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary in 2015.
