Feature: Vivian Maier

This week we dive into the life of American street photographer Vivian Maier. She was born in New York City in 1926, the daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier. She worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago's North Shore, while she pursued her 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 During her lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished; many of her negatives were never printed.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.

Most of Maier’s photographs are black and white, with many casual shots of people caught in transient moments “that nonetheless possess an underlying gravity and emotion”.

To read more about Vivian, visit her official website here.