Vivian Maier: the story of a brilliant silent photographer

Famous American street photographer Vivian Maier captured the world in awe with her magnificent photographs during the 20th century. Born in New York City, Vivian Maier was an American street photographer who lived from February 1, 1926, until April 21, 2009. Maier was born in the United States, although she spent most of her formative years in France. In 1951, Maier made her way back to the United States, where she started working as a nanny and caregiver for the remainder of her life. However, Maier had started dabbling in photography during her free time. She continued to take pictures for five decades, leaving behind over 100,000 negatives, most of which were taken in Chicago and New York City. Vivian would continue to indulge in her intense interest for preserving the world around her through homemade videos, records, and collections, putting together one of the most intriguing windows into American society in the latter half of the 20th century.

While living in France, Vivian started experimenting with her first photographs sometime in 1949. She used a basic Kodak Brownie box camera, an entry-level model without a focus dial or an aperture dial, and with just one shutter speed. The viewing screen is small, and its inaccuracy can potentially act as a barrier between Vivian and her aspirations as a controlled landscape or portrait artist. Her plans were in the hands of this weak machine. On the steamer De-Grass, Maier makes her way back to New York in 1951, where she settles down as a nanny for a Southampton family. To satisfy her obsession, Vivian bought a Rolleiflex camera in 1952. She is renowned for capturing images while walking down the street with her Rolleiflex camera, chatting with passersby, and enjoying her solitary excursions to various locations and historic buildings. She is also recognized for shooting portraits of people that catch her attention. She likes to imagine the little neighborhoods, underprivileged kids, and old people, capturing their feelings. Up until 1956, she spends the majority of her time in New York with this family before making her last relocation to the Chicago North Shore suburbs. Vivian would work for another family as their three boys' nanny, and they would end up becoming her lifelong closest family.

Maier had the luxury of a darkroom and a private toilet when she relocated to Chicago in 1956. This gave her the ability to handle the printing and B&W film development herself. The early 1970s saw Maier's work with that first Chicago family come to an end, forcing her to stop creating her own films as the kids grew older. Her rolls of incomplete, unprinted work started to accumulate as she moved from family to family. Around this time, Maier made the decision to move to color photography, utilizing a Leica IIIc and a variety of German SLR cameras to capture his images, usually on Kodak Ektachrome 35mm film. In contrast to Maier's earlier work, the color work would have an edge to it, and as time went on, it would become more abstract. Her photographs gradually began to lose their subjects as graffiti, newspapers, and miscellaneous things took their place.

Similar to this, her art demonstrated a need to hold onto things she would discover in trash cans or laying by the curb.

In her free time, Vivian Maier explored her interest in photography while working as a nanny, with her primary subjects being the streets of central Chicago and New York. With her Rolleiflex twin lens camera, Maier would record everyday life; her most frequent topics were portraits of recognizable people, urban architecture, and kids at play. To create the unrestrained quality of her images, she used a hidden lens when taking them. Although Maier produced a lot of work often using a roll of film each day—she maintained her secrecy and seldom showed anybody her work.

In addition to creating self-portraits that challenge the conventions of photographic representation, Maier accumulated a sizable collection of street photography. Her writing captures the changing atmosphere of America in the 1950s and 1960s.

Her two main photographic genres between 1970 and 1990 were portraiture and kid photography because she was a nanny herself. She worked in a range of genres, including landscape, architecture, and portraits. She photographed a variety of themes, including playful images of kids, African kids from varied backgrounds, stylish women, eye-catching social concerns, various street scenes, building facades, and individuals engaged in their daily routines.

Vivian struck her head in downtown Chicago in 2008 after slipping on some ice. Vivian was anticipated to fully recover, but when her health started to decline, she was compelled to move into a nursing facility. A short while later, in April 2009, she suddenly passed away, leaving behind a sizable collection of work. "Vivian Maier: Anthology" is now on display at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, a city located about 55 miles northwest of London. It includes more than 140 pictures as well as audio and video samples. According to the museum's curators, the exhibition highlights Maier's singular ability to depict daily life while injecting it with "wit, humor, and a deep sense of humanity".

With a level of talent that is "far above that of any part-time hobbyist", the exhibition observes that Maier captured images of burning furniture, electric cables, kids, housewives, homeless people, abandoned toys, and practically everything in between. As Maier's isolationist behavior worsened and she encountered further financial hardships, she stashed her expanding collection of photographic negatives in storage containers. Her storage containers' contents were auctioned to pay off bills while she was in the hospital. A Chicago-based auctioneer, the RPN Sales, bought them and offered the containers up for sale; John Maloof, the man behind the Vivian Maier archive, bought a significant portion of them. "Finding Vivian Maier", a documentary that was released in 2013, traces her life story, a career nanny whose previously unknown cache of 100,000 photographs has earned her a posthumous reputation as one of America’s most accomplished and insightful street photographers of all times.

Photos from IG profile: vivianmaierarchive

and from the website: http://www.vivianmaier.com/