The Hidden World of Vivian Maier

Interview John Maloof, the man who brought Vivian Maier photos to the world. Vivian Maier has been recognized as one of the most fascinating street photographers of the 20th century.

Vivian Maier

Vivian Dorothea Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) was an American amateur street photographer, who was born in New York City but grew up in France, and after returning to the US, worked for about forty years as a nanny in Chicago. During those years she took about 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes most often in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide.

Her photographs remained unknown and mostly undeveloped and unprinted until they were discovered by a local Chicago historian and collector,John Maloof, in 2007. Following Maier’s death, her work began to receive critical acclaim. Her photographs have been exhibited in the US, England, Germany, Denmark, and Norway, and have appeared in newspapers and magazines in the US, England, Germany, Italy, France and other countries. A book of her photography titled Vivian Maier: Street Photographer was published in 2011.

Maier’s images predominantly depict street scenes in Chicago and New York, in the 1950s and 1960s. An article in The Independent characterizes her photographs thus: The well-to-do shoppers of Chicago stroll and gossip in all their department-store finery before Maier, but the most arresting subjects are those people on the margins of successful, rich America in the 1950s and 1960s: the kids, the black maids, the bums flaked out on shop stoops.

Source : Wikipedia