Vivian Dorothy Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer whose work was discovered and recognized after her death. She worked for about 40 years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, while pursuing photography. 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During her lifetime, Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of her negatives were never developed. 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.
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.
Table of Contents
- 1 Personal life
- 2 Photography
- 2.1 Finding Vivian Maier
- 2.2 Vivian Maier: Street Photographer
- 2.3 Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found
- 2.4 Finding Vivian Maier
- 2.5 Vivian Maier: The Color Work
- 2.6 The Vivian Maier Mystery
- 2.7 Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife
- 2.8 Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows
- 2.9 Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits
- 2.10 Vivian Maier Developed: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny
Personal life
Many details of Maier’s spirit remain unknown. 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 era during her childhood she moved along with the U.S. and France, living with her mom in the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near her mother’s relatives. Her dad seems to have left the relations temporarily for unspecified reasons by 1930. In the 1930 Census, the head of the household was listed as Jeanne Bertrand, a rich 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 bearing in mind Bertrand.
In 1935, Vivian and her mother were vibrant 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 blooming in New York, where the daddy 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 well along said of Maier, “She was bearing in mind a real, live Mary Poppins,” and said she never talked by the side of to kids and was Definite to achievement them the world external their well-off suburb. The families who employed her described her as no question private and reported that she spent her days off walking the streets of Chicago and taking photographs, usually with a Rolleiflex camera.
John Maloof, curator of some of Maier’s photographs, summarized the artifice the kids she nannied would unconventional describe her:
In 1959 and 1960, Maier embarked on a solo vacation around the world, taking pictures in Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy. The vacation was probably financed by the sale of a relations farm in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur. For a brief epoch 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 moreover recorded audiotapes of conversations she had subsequently people she photographed. In the documentary films Finding Vivian Maier (2013) and Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny’s Pictures / The Vivian Maier Mystery (2013), interviews later Maier’s employers and their kids suggest that Maier presented herself to others in multipart ways, with various accents, names, life details, and that considering some children, she had been challenging and positive, while gone others she could be frightening and abusive.
The Gensburg brothers, whom Maier had looked after as children, tried to encourage her as she became destitute in old-fashioned age. When she was virtually to be evicted from a cheap apartment in the suburb of Cicero, the Gensburg brothers approved for her to bring to life in a augmented apartment upon Sheridan Road in the Rogers Park area of Chicago. In November 2008, Maier fell on the ice and hit her head. She was taken to a hospital but unsuccessful to recover. In January 2009, she was transported to a nursing house in the Chicago suburbs, where she died upon April 21.
Photography
Artist and photography critic Allan Sekula has suggested that the fact that Maier spent much of her yet to be life in France sharpened her visual wave of American cities and society. Sekula compared her do something with the photography of Swiss-born Robert Frank: “I find myself imagining her as a female Robert Frank, without a Guggenheim grant, unknown and on the go as a nanny to gain by. I next think she showed the world of women and kids in a pretension that is pretty much unprecedented.”
Maloof has said of her work: “Elderly folk congregating in Chicago’s Old Polish Downtown, garishly dressed dowagers, and the urban African-American experience were anything fair game for Maier’s lens.” Photographer Mary Ellen Mark has compared her operate to that of Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Lisette Model, and Diane Arbus. Joel Meyerowitz, also a street photographer, has said that Maier’s take action was “suffused subsequent to the kind of human understanding, warmth and playfulness that proves she was ‘a real shooter’.”
Maier’s best-known photographs depict street scenes in Chicago and New York during the 1950s and 1960s. A critic in The Independent wrote that “the rich shoppers of Chicago saunter and gossip in everything their department-store finery since Maier, but the most arresting subjects are those people upon the margins of successful, rich America in the 1950s and 1960s: the kids, the black maids, the bums flaked out upon shop stoops.” Most of Maier’s photographs are black and white, and many are casual shots of passers-by caught in transient moments “that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion”.
In 1952 she purchased her first Rolleiflex camera. Over the course of her career she used Rolleiflex 3.5T, Rolleiflex 3.5F, Rolleiflex 2.8C, Rolleiflex Automat and others. She progressive also used a Leica IIIc, an Ihagee Exakta, a Zeiss Contarex and various new SLR cameras.
Writing in The Wall Street Journal, William Meyers interpretation that because Maier used a medium-format Rolleiflex, rather than a 35mm camera, her pictures have more detail than those of most street photographers. He writes that her acquit yourself brings to mind the photographs of Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, as capably as Robert Frank. He in addition to notes that there are a tall number of self-portraits in her work, “in many ingenious permutations, as if she were checking on her own identity or interpolating herself into the environment. A secret character, she often photographed her own shadow, possibly as a artifice of instinctive there and simultaneously virtually there.”
Roberta Smith, writing in The New York Times, has drawn attention to how Maier’s photographs are reminiscent of many well-known 20th-century photographers, and still have an aesthetic of their own. She writes that Maier’s work “may build up to the records of 20th-century street photography by summing it in the works with an approaching encyclopedic thoroughness, veering near to on every well-known photographer you can think of, including Weegee, Robert Frank and Richard Avedon, and next sliding off in unorthodox direction. Yet they preserve a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized by a lack of rushed movement or extreme emotion.”
In the documentary film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), the grown-up children whom Maier had cared for in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s remember how she amass her pretense as a photographer subsequent to her hours of daylight job as a nanny. She would frequently accept the young children in her care in the same way as her into the middle of Chicago once she took her photographs. Occasionally they accompanied her to the rougher, run-down areas of Chicago, and, on one occasion, the hoard yards, where there were bodies of dead sheep.
In the late 1970s, Maier stopped using her Rolleiflex. Most of her photographs taken in the 1980s and 1990s were color transparencies, taken on Ektachrome film.
Last update 2021-08-06