Decidedly unmaterialistic, Vivian would come to amass a group of storage lockers stuffed to the brim with found items, art books, newspaper clippings, home films, as well as political tchotchkes and knick-knacks. Someone who was intensely guarded and private, Vivian could be counted on to feistily preach her own very liberal worldview to anyone who cared to listen, or didn’t. A person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City. She passed away in 2009 at the age of 83.Piecing together Vivian Maier’s life can easily evoke Churchill’s famous quote about the vast land of Tsars and commissars that lay to the east. Maier lost possession of her art when her storage locker was sold off for non-payment. She took hundreds of thousands of photographs in her lifetime, but never shared them with anyone. Seemingly without a family of her own, the children she cared for eventually acted as caregivers for Maier herself in the autumn of her life. What is known is that she was born in New York in 1926 and worked as a nanny for a family on Chicagos North Shore during the 50s and 60s. There is still very little known about the life of Vivian Maier. Presented here for the first time in print, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer collects the best of her incredible, unseen body of work. It wasnt until local historian John Maloof purchased a box of Maiers negatives from a Chicago auction house and began collecting and championing her marvelous work just a few years ago that any of it saw the light of day. The photos are amazing both for the breadth of the work and for the high quality of the humorous, moving, beautiful, and raw images of all facets of city life in Americas post-war golden age. Yet Vivian Maier is all of these things, a professional nanny, who from the 1950s until the 1990s took over 100,000 photographs worldwide from France to New York City to Chicago and dozens of other countriesand yet showed the results to no one. It is incredibly rare to find it in someone with no formal training and no network of peers. It is hard enough to find these qualities in trained photographers with the benefit of schooling and mentors and a community of fellow artists and aficionados supporting and rewarding their efforts. A good street photographer must be possessed of many talents: an eye for detail, light, and composition impeccable timing a populist or humanitarian outlook and a tireless ability to constantly shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot and never miss a moment.
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