Vivian
Dorothea Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) 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,
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
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 find out 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.
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 take 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.
Vivian Maier: mysterious and eccentric nanny who took
stunning photographs
Documentary out
this week tells remarkable story of Maier and the photographs she shot – and
then deliberately kept secret
Mark Brown,
arts correspondent
The
Guardian, Monday 14 July 2014 / http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/jul/14/vivian-maier-rarely-seen-photographs
Vivian
Maier was a mysterious and eccentric nanny who spent a lifetime looking after
other people's children while harbouring a rather lovely secret: she was an
astonishingly accomplished photographer.
The
Guardian newspaper on Tuesday publishes rarely seen photographs by a woman now
considered one of the finest street photographers of the 20th century.
A
documentary film released on Friday will tell the remarkable story of Maier and
the photographs she took – and then deliberately kept secret.
Maier is
today considered a genius whose photographs stand comparison with names such as
Diane Arbus and Robert Frank.
But if it
had not been for a chance discovery at a Chicago
thrift auction in 2007, the world would still be unaware of her life and
talents.
The
discovery was made by a young former estate agent called John Maloof who was
writing a history book on his Chicago
neighbourhood.
He said:
"I was wondering how I would find enough old photos to illustrate the book
and tried my luck at a local junk and furniture auction house."
Maloof
bought a box packed with about 30,000 negatives, which he did not use in the
end.
"However,
I knew to keep them. I thought: 'I'm resourceful. I'll look at them later when
I have more time. Fast forward two years later, that purchase had unearthed
some of the finest street photography of the 20th century."
Maloof set about finding out who Maier was,
and decided also to make a film documenting his discoveries.
"My obsession drove us to compile a
library of interviews and strange stories from across the globe. We found
roughly 100 people who had contact with Vivian Maier. In the film we let people
speak for themselves.
"I hope that this story comes through
honest and pure, and does more than just uncover a mysterious artist but tells
a story that changed the history of photography."
Maloof has made the film with Charlie
Siskel, who produced Michael Moore's film Bowling for Columbine. The executive
producer is Jeff Garlin, who has many credits but will be forever famous as
Larry David's agent in eight seasons of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Maier's day job for 40 years was as a nanny
working for families in Chicago ,
often taking her charges out with her when she was taking photographs.
Because she had no permanent home, she kept
all her negatives in a Chicago
storage facility. She died in 2009, too early to know about the high regard she
is held in today.
Siskel acknowledged that "if Vivian
Maier had her choice the world would know nothing of her life and photographs.
She chose to conceal herself and her art during her lifetime.
"But hiding one's art is, of course,
the opposite of destroying it. Maier preserved her work and left its fate to
others."
Since the discovery of Maier's talents she
has become a phenomenon, with galleries selling her prints for upwards of
$2,000 (£1,200).
There have been books, exhibitions and a
BBC Imagine documentary which called her "a poet of suburbia" and a
"Mary Poppins with a camera".
Siskel said Maier was "a kind of
spy" capturing street life and "recording humanity as it appeared,
wherever it appeared – in stockyards, slums and suburbia itself".
But she was also an outsider and Siskel
believed she "may have secretly longed for the family bonds she witnessed
intimately for decades".
He added: "Her work is now part of the
history of photography and an undeniable treasure. The discovery of Maier's
work not only gave her story an ending, there would be no story without
it."
Finding Vivian Maier is released on Friday
18 July.
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