Around eight years ago, the work of Vivian Maier burst upon the scene but before that, for over forty years, she lived in relative obscurity as a nanny to the affluent of Chicago. During that time, she took over 150,000 pictures that she didn’t share with anyone.
This BBC documentary tells her story and how her images came to be discovered and praised only after her death.
From Wikipedia:
Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time. 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 worldwide.
During her lifetime, Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of her negatives were never printed. 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. Maier’s photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response. 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.
I own this book — it’s a nice sampling of her work although it has little insight into her as a person.
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