Vivian Maier

Posted by Photo Slaves in PhotographersMar 14th, 2011 | no responses

The story of Vivian Maier and her recently discovered work has been circulating for a while now ever since photographer John Maloof posted about his discovery. Vivian Maier, a French-born photographer who died in April 2009 in Chicago, where she had lived for 50 years. A Chicago photographer, John Maloof, recently purchased around 40,000 of her negatives from a small auction house that was selling all her possessions, including furniture. He is gradually going through the negs, which date from the 1950s to 1970s and posting selected pictures on a blog. She seems to have no living family, and an obituary that appeared in a Chicago paper was probably placed by people she worked for as a nanny. Maloof was contacted by a researcher who said that she was a Jewish refugee from wartime France, was a loner and poor.

Vivian Maier, evidently one of America’s more insightful street photographers, has at last been discovered. The release of every fresh image on the Web causes a sensation among the growing legion of her admirers. Ms. Maier’s streetscapes manage simultaneously to capture a redolent sense of place and the paradoxical moments that give the city its jazz, while elevating and dignifying the people in her frames — vulnerable, noble, defeated, proud, fragile, tender and often quite funny.

What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

John Maloof, a 29-year-old eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent, is now principal cheerleader in the effort to find a niche for Ms. Maier at the pantheon of modern photography. He is only about one-tenth of the way into the task of scanning and archiving 100,000 negatives of hers in his possession, working with his friend Anthony Rydzon. And they have yet to develop several hundred rolls of black-and-white film and about 600 color rolls.

Another large collection — including 12,000 negatives and 70 homemade movies — is in the hands of Jeff Goldstein and his collaborators at Vivian Maier Photography.

Mr. Maloof acquired his first boxful of her negatives for $400 at an auction in 2007. They had been in a commercial storage locker whose contents were seized for non-payment. He was interested in them because they depicted Chicago scenes and he was working with Daniel Pogorzelski on an illustrated history of the Portage Park neighborhood for Arcadia’s Images of America series.

Shocking to think that this collection could easily have ended up in skip and never seen…