Maier V. Street Photographer

For 40 years Vivian Maier worked as a governess for American families, and in her spare time she passionately photographed street life on a medium format Rolleiflex. The amazing thing is that she didn’t care about publishing her pictures, but she nevertheless carefully stored her footage. There are large storage rooms in Chicago where, for a modest fee, people turn in old things that are in their way at home. And when the owners stop paying, all that ancient junk goes under the hammer at auction. In 2007, John Maloof, a 26-year-old real estate agent who writes an article about Chicago’s history and people, blindly bought a box of old negatives at this auction. He had never been much interested in photography before, but after developing the films, he realized that he had come into possession of a real treasure. At the same auction, he found and purchased other boxes from the same vault with thousands of undeveloped films. About a year after his purchase, John found an envelope in one of the boxes with the name of the owner of the archive. Googling the name Vivian Maier, he found only a short obituary. In his search for the photographer, John found first one family Vivian lived with, then another. One of them gave him Nanny’s personal belongings – a suitcase full of clothes, boxes of newspaper clippings, developed photos and her photographic equipment, in particular the very Rolleiflex camera with which she shot almost all of her subjects. Maloof then posted some of the scanned images on the Internet, where they caused quite a sensation. He received about 200 offers to make an exhibition or a documentary about Vivian Maier. The exhibition debuted at the Chicago Cultural Center in 2011.