Today we have chosen Vivian Maier, one of the most intriguing photographers of the 20th century, as our Friday Photographer.
Called “the greatest photographer you’ve never heard of”, the mysterious Vivian Maier, a nanny based in Chicago took about 150,000 photographs in her lifetime and stashed them away, not showing them to anyone.
Maier (1926 – 2009) was born in New York City, but grew up in France. After returning to the United States, she worked for approximately forty years as a nanny in Chicago, Illinois. During those years, she took photographs every day, primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide.
She left thousands of pictures not even developed, and most as negatives from which she never made prints. Maier saw most of her photos just once, through the viewfinder of her camera when she took them.
Maier was a secret street photographer even before the term was invented. Her exceptional work captures the true spirit of America with an analytical gaze.
It was sheer accident that her life’s work was discovered.Two years before she died in 2009, Vivian Maier stopped paying the rent on five storage lockers in Chicago. Without her knowledge the contents were sold. At locker sales, you have to stand at the door and buy without touching. So auctioneer Roger Gunderson saw only a jumble of boxes and suitcases:
“A Paris sticker on one trunk caught my eye. I thought maybe there’s going to be some perfume or jewellery.“ Gunderson bought the lot for $250 - "a truck and a half load of stuff”, he says: papers, magazines and thousands upon thousands of photographs.
People who then bought them at auction posted a few online. Before long, Vivian Maier went viral. Now her prints sell for thousands of dollars a piece.
In her lifetime Vivian Maier had perhaps 5,000 prints made. Some she made in the bathrooms of her lodgings - moving from family to family, she never had a home of her own.
Some were made at drugstores where she had negatives developed. She put some of these prints into albums. John Maloof, curator of some of Maier’s photographs, summarizes 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 wore a men’s jacket, men’s shoes, and a large hat most of the time. She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn’t show anyone.”
Toward the end of her life, Maier may have been homeless for some time. She lived on social security and may have had another source of income, but the children she had taken care of in the early 1950s bought her an apartment in Chicago and paid her bills. In 2008, she slipped on ice and hit her head. She did not fully recover and died in 2009, at 83.
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