Although she developed some of her works, Maier rarely shared or showed them. As a woman working alone, this took gumption. Her time off was spent heading to the darker areas of town, where she knew images were to be had. Her work as a nanny gave her the freedom to be out and about with her charges. Maier’s photography was a powerful means of self-expression. Her camera was part of her identity. She had a genius, too, for electrifying composition and the contrast of dark and light, be it seen in a plant edging delicately between the slats of a fence or a skyscraper reflected in a puddle.Ī street seller, Chicago, 1971 © Estate of Vivian Maier, courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYĪpparently, no one other than herself.
She gives us the anguish of rickety little malnourished knees and the gnarly hands of burly workers. Maier had a fascination with the human form. We see bustling haughty matrons, street sellers, tiny children clutching mother’s skirts, and skinny, streetwise boys smoking cigarettes. But she was drawn to the human spirit in all its forms. Some say she had an affinity with the poor the down and out certainly feature strongly. Since then interest in Maier has gained momentum, culminating with exhibitions, documentaries and new books.Īn image captured on 26 January 1955 in New York © Estate of Vivian Maier, courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY One of the lockers was auctioned off, buyers bidding blind, with no idea of what lay inside. In 2007 her oeuvre came fully to light, when it was auctioned at a local thrift auction house in Chicago. Still shooting into the 1990s, Maier had been keeping her work in storage but had run out of money to pay to do so. It had lain hidden in storage lockers for years. Those shots, over 140,000 of them, form an astonishing collection of beautiful, unsettling, humorous and haunting images, which came to light by chance. From her early 20s onwards she quietly captured life on the streets with her camera.
Yet she was fascinated by people and society – and she had a remarkable gift. With no family contact nor evidence of relationships, she worked as a nanny in Chicago, where she settled from 1956.Ī reclusive woman with a propensity to hoard, Maier was elegant, proud, feisty and, above all, private. All her life Maier was an outsider and a loner. She grew up between Europe and the United States, not through a life of wealth, but because, with her father no longer on the scene, her mother, who was in domestic service, went where there was work. A self-portrait, New York, © Estate of Vivian Maier, courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NYīorn in New York City in 1926, Maier was of French and Austro-Hungarian descent.
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