Vivian Dorothea Maier was an American street photographer, who was born in New York City
and spent much of her childhood 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 more than 150,000 photographs, primarily of people and architecture of New York, Chicago,
Los Angeles, although she traveled and photographed worldwide.
Maier's photographs remained unknown, and many of her films remained undeveloped, until
her boxes of possessions were auctioned off. A Chicago historian and collector, John Maloof,
examined the images and started to post Maier's photographs on the web in 2009, soon after
Maier's death. Critical acclaim and interest in Maier's work quickly followed. Maier's
photographs have been exhibited in the USA, Europe and Asia and have been featured in
many articles throughout the world. Her life and work have been the subject of both books
and documentary films.
Photography Photography critic Allan Sekula has suggested
that the fact that Maier spent much of her early life in France, sharpened her visual
appreciation of American cities and society. Sekula compared her work with the photography
of Swiss-born Robert Frank: "I find myself imagining her as a female Robert Frank, without
a Guggenheim grant, unknown and working as a nanny to get by. I also think she showed
the world of women and children in a way that is pretty much unprecedented."
John 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 all
fair game for Maier’s lens." Looking at Maier's oeuvre, photographer Mary Ellen Mark
has compared Maier's work to that of Helen Levitt, Robert Frank, Lisette Model and Diane
Arbus. Joel Meyerowitz, also a street photographer, has said that Maier’s work was "suffused
with 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 well-to-do shoppers of Chicago stroll and gossip in all their department-store
finery before Maier, but the most arresting subjects are those people on the margins of
successful, rich America in the 1950s and 1960s: the kids, the black maids, the bums
flaked out on shop stoops." Most of Maier’s photographs are black and white, and many
feature casual shots of passers-by caught in transient moments "that nonetheless possess
an underlying gravity and emotion". Writing in The Wall Street Journal, William
Meyers notes that because Maier used a medium-format Rolleiflex, rather than a 35mm camera, Maier's
pictures have more detail than those of most street photographers. Meyers writes that Maier's
work brings to mind the photographs of Harry Callahan, Garry Winogrand, and Weegee, as
well as Robert Frank. Meyers also notes that there are a high number of self-portraits
in Maier's work, "in many ingenious permutations, as if she were checking on her own identity
or interpolating herself into the environment. A shadowy character, she often photographed
her own shadow, possibly as a way of being there and simultaneously not quite there."
Roberta Smith writing in The New York Times has drawn attention to the way in which Maier's
photographs are reminiscent are many famous 20th century photographers, and yet have an
aesthetic of their own. She writes that Maier's work "may add to the history of 20th-century
street photography by summing it up with an almost encyclopedic thoroughness, veering
close to just about every well-known photographer you can think of, including Weegee, Robert
Frank and Richard Avedon, and then sliding off in another direction. Yet they maintain
a distinctive element of calm, a clarity of composition and a gentleness characterized
by a lack of sudden movement or extreme emotion." In the documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier,
the grown-up children whom Maier had cared for in the 1950s, 60s and 70s recall how she
combined her work as a photographer with her day job as a nanny. She would frequently take
the young children in her care with her into the centre of Chicago, when she took her photographs.
Occasionally they accompanied her to the rougher, run-down areas of Chicago, and, on one occasion,
the stock yards, where there were bodies of dead sheep.
In the late 1970s, Maier ceased to use her Rolleiflex. The majority of her photographs
taken in the 1980s and 1990s were color transparencies, taken on Ektachrome film.
Discovery and recognition In 2007, two years before she died, Maier
failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago's North Side. As
a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8mm film, were auctioned. Three photo
collectors purchased parts of her work: John Maloof, Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow. Maier's
photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008 by Slattery, but the work received
little response. Maloof had purchased the largest part of Maier's
work, about 30,000 negatives, because he was working on a history book about the Chicago
neighborhood of Portage Park, Maloof subsequently purchased more of Maier's photographs from
another buyer at the same auction. Maloof discovered Maier's name in his boxes, but
was unable to discover anything about her until a Google search led him to Maier's death
notice in the Chicago Tribune in April 2009. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to
a selection of Maier's photographs on Flickr, and the results went "viral", with thousands
of people expressing interest. In the spring of 2010, Chicago art collector
Jeffrey Goldstein acquired a portion of the Maier collection from Prow, one of the original
buyers. Since Goldstein's original purchase, his collection has grown to include 17,500
negatives, 2,000 prints, 30 homemade movies, and numerous slides. Maloof, who runs the
Maloof Collection, now owns 100,000 to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 vintage prints,
hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, audio tape interviews, and ephemera including cameras
and paperwork, which he claims represents roughly 90 per cent of her known work.
Since her posthumous discovery, Maier's photographs, and the way they were discovered, have received
international attention in mainstream media, and her work has featured in gallery exhibitions,
several books, and two documentary films. Personal life
Many details of Maier's life remain unknown. She was born in New York City, the daughter
of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier. Several times
during her childhood she moved between the U.S. and France, living with her mother in
the Alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near her mother's relations. Her father seems
to have left the family temporarily for unknown reasons by 1930. In the 1930 census, the head
of the household was listed Jeanne Bertrand, a successful photographer who knew Gertrude
Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.
In 1935, Vivian and her mother, Maria, were living in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur and prior
to 1940 returned to New York. Her father and brother Charles stayed in New York. The family
of Charles, Maria, Vivian and Charles were living in New York in 1940, where her father
worked as a steam engineer. In 1951, aged 25, Maier moved from France
to New York, NY, where she worked in a sweatshop. She moved to the Chicago area's North Shore
in 1956, where for approximately 40 years, Maier worked on and off as a nanny. For her
first 17 years in Chicago, Maier worked for two families: the Gensburgs from 1956 to 1972,
and the Raymonds from 1967 to 1973. Lane Gensburg later said of Maier, "She was like a real,
live Mary Poppins," and said she never talked down to kids and was determined to show them
the world outside their affluent suburb. The families that employed her described her as
very 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, 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 was constantly taking pictures,
which she didn't show anyone.
In 1959 and 1960, Maier took a trip around the world on her own, photographing Los Angeles,
Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt and Italy. The trip was probably
financed by the sale of a family farm in Saint-Julien-en-Champsaur. For a brief period in the 1970s, Maier worked
as a nanny for Phil Donahue's children. She kept her belongings at her employers; at one,
she had 200 boxes of materials. Most were photographs or negatives, but Maier also collected
newspapers, and sometimes recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with people she photographed.
The Gensburg brothers, whom Maier had looked after as children, tried to help her as she
became poorer in old age. When Maier was about to be evicted from a cheap apartment in the
suburb of Cicero, the Gensburg brothers arranged for Maier to live in a better apartment on
Sheridan Road, North Chicago. In November 2008, Maier fell on the ice and hit her head.
She was taken to hospital but failed to recover. In January 2009, Maier was transported to
a nursing home in Highland Park, where she died on April 21, 2009.
Books of Maier's photographs John Maloof, ed.. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer.
powerHouse Books. ISBN 978-1-57687-577-3. Cahan, Richard and Williams, Michael, Vivian
Maier: Out of the Shadows. CityFiles Press, 2012. ISBN 978-0978545093
John Maloof, ed.. Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits. powerHouse Books. ISBN 978-1-57687-662-6.
Cahan, Richard and Williams, Michael, Eye to Eye: Photographs by Vivian Maier. CityFiles
Press, 2014. ISBN 9780991541805. Exhibitions
Documentary films about Maier Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures, directed
by Jill Nicholls, produced by the BBC. This film was re-cut and released in the U.S. in
December 2013, as The Vivian Maier Mystery. Finding Vivian Maier, directed by John Maloof
and Charlie Siskel See also
Angelo Rizzuto Charles Jones
References
External links Maloof Collection website on Vivian Maier
Jeffrey Goldstein Collection website on Vivian Maier
Finding Vivian Maier - An Interview with Producer, Co-Director Charlie Siskel by Stephen Slaughter
Head, PostMovie.net, April 3, 2014 "The Nanny's Secret" by William Meyers, The
Wall Street Journal, January 3, 2012 "Vivian Maier: The Unheralded Street Photographer"
by David Zax, Smithsonian Magazine, December 2011
"Nanny Strangest: On "Finding Vivian Maier," by Richard B. Woodward, The Wall Street Journal,
March 25, 2014.