Vivian Maier

Image found on www.erickimphotography.com

Iconic street photographer from the 40’s through the 70’s

Vivian Maier took over 2,000 rolls of film, printed over 3,000 photographs and produced more than 150,000 negatives of which were mainly (about 90%) medium format negatives taken on her Rolleiflex TLR camera. Maier’s ability to capture lighting, motion and the essence of the scene, all in one frame, is outstanding and even more so in that she rarely took more than one shot of any one moment.

For most of Maier’s adult life she worked as a nanny, spending her days off walking the streets taking photographs.

Later in life the children she had looked after   described her as “Mary Poppins-like”, often taking them on wild adventures and showing them the unusual.

Falling on hard times Maier became poor and was ultimately rescued by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. They rallied together and payed for an apartment, but little did they know that one of the various storage lockers was auctioned off due to defaulting payments. In those lockers sat the massive hoard of negatives Maier had quietly stashed away. A vast collection of decades of pictures she had never shown to anybody.

Maier’s colossal body of work only came to light in 2007, when her work was discovered by john Maloof at a local thrift auction house on Chicago’s Northwest side. Maloof at first thought he had bought a collection of historical architectural negatives, but after looking through them, came to realize the subject matter.

John managed to acquire the second auctioned lot of photographs and in doing so was able to reunite the collection. Over two years John painstakingly scanned in the negatives, revealing the body and quality of the photographs, a collection that would eventually impact the world over and change the life of John Maloof.

On the back of an envelope for in one of the boxes, John found written the name Vivian Maier. John searched the web and found a just published obituary; Vivian Maier had died at 83 just three days earlier. 

Click here for more on Vivian Maier by John Maloof

Books on Vivian Maier can be found HERE.