Vivian Maier on the Streets of Mid-Century New York and Chicago
The Ultimate Nanny Cam
It’s the unparalleled photo-nerd version of striking gold: In 2007, historian and author John Maloof buys a lot of tens of thousands of negatives at auction for a measly $380 and unwittingly unearths the brilliant photographic work of a secretive nanny from the Bronx. This unknown talent quickly, albeit posthumously, rockets to superstardom in both the photo world and the world at large.
As a result of Maloof’s legendary purchase, Vivian Maier, the nanny in question, has become a rightfully lauded figure of street photography in midcentury Chicago, where she lived from 1956 until her death in 2009. Her work has drawn comparisons to photographic legends like Berenice Abbott, Robert Frank, Lewis, Diane Arbus. That Maier almost always took only one frame of each picture and still produced such a quantity of outstanding work is mind-blowing.
Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found, published by Harper Design, is the third volume to come out in three years on Maier, a photographer whose work hasn’t even been in the public eye for a decade. With over 200 mostly unseen images taken from 1950s to the 1970s, including her move into color which she shot almost exclusively after 1973, the book provides even more evidence that the lofty comparisons with the greats are quite sound.
The small number of people who knew Maier knew she was a shutterbug. In spite of this, she hadn’t let anyone see the thousands upon thousands of photos she made. She was equally secretive about her personal life, kept few if any family ties, and had only a handful of friends, seemingly none of them very close.
Much has been written about Maier being an odd bird. She dressed out of fashion for the time, spoke her mind too freely to get along with everyone, and had the sort of personality that either drew you in or repelled you. In the book’s in-depth introduction, Marvin Heiferman combs through the few known facts about Maier to draw out a fuller picture of how she became the photographer she was.
In 1926, Maier was born in the Bronx to European parents. When she was young, her parents separated and Maier and her mother lived, for a short time according to census data, with Jeanne Bertrand, an artist who also worked in a photo studio.
While it’s easy to latch onto this as the beginning of her fascination, Maier was only four at the time and there is, as with most everything in her history, no actual evidence that this had anything to do with her interest in photography. Whatever the initial spark was, by the time Maier was in her early twenties, she was already photographing voraciously, taking thousands of pictures while visiting family and traveling in Europe.
Maier spent key years in New York City which, in the 1950s, was a hotbed of photographic activity. Galleries and museums were plentiful, a number of famous photographers lived in the city, and in 1956, the groundbreaking Family of Man photo exhibition opened at MoMA.
In 1956, Maier moved to Chicago for unknown reasons and worked as a caretaker, nanny, and housekeeper (working for a time for Phil Donahue and his five children) until the 1990s. She also photographed incessantly, making subjects of her charges, people she knew, and, most notably, of the working class going about their business on the streets of post-war Chicago. She wandered freely around neighborhoods where most wouldn’t go unless they had to, bringing her charges along with her while she photographed.
A crucial factor leading to the sale of Maier’s negatives was that, in addition to being an obsessive image-maker, Maier had also become a hoarder. Her collections included, among many other things, thousands of books and a vast collection of newspaper clippings (filed in binders by subject: Kennedy-related, Dear Abby columns, etc.), sometimes keeping the entire day’s paper. At one point, the combined weight of these collections almost collapsed the floor of her second story bedroom, right into her employer’s home dental office below. Strangely, rather than force her to part with her collections, they simply reinforced the ceiling with a metal pole.
At some point, Maier began renting storage space, though her hoarding had already contributed to the loss of jobs. Combined with the fact that she simply couldn’t find enough work when she got older, Maier became impoverished. After not paying the rent on the five storage spaces she kept, the contents were sold to the auction house which in turn auctioned off her belongings, which is how Maloof (and other buyers) ended up owning her photographs.
Although Maloof made the purchase in 2007 and found her name on the label from a film processing lab, his Google searches revealed nothing. In April 2009, he tried again and came across Maier’s death notice that the Gensburg family, her long-time employers, had posted.
In the final decade or so of her life, Maier had been unwell, living in poverty, and was possibly homeless for a time. She’d been seen sitting in the park in all weather, speaking to herself in French and sometimes shouting at those who passed her. Though two of her former charges, the Gensburg children, tried to keep tabs on her and helped as much as they could, even housing her for a time, it was to no avail. Around Christmas 2008, shortly after Maloof’s purchase, she fell and hit her head. Never fully recovering, Maier died in a nursing home on April 21, 2009.
Maier had just one sibling, a brother six years older than her, who long ago estranged himself from his entire family and changed his name. He is, as far as anyone has yet to determine, Maier’s only rightful heir. Yet his whereabouts, and whether he is alive at all, remain unknown. Because of the mystery shrouding her next of kin a legal battle over her estate is currently being hashed out.
Maier produced such a large quantity of work so deliberately and with such dedication and discipline that it’s unfathomable that no one ever knew the quality of what she produced during her lifetime. As secretive as she was, it’s clear from her photos that Maier not only had direct interaction with her subjects but also wished to document these interactions over and over. While some are clearly observational, with no evidence of interaction within the frame, enough others show direct eye contact between her and her subjects.
Maier’s presence and intent are both strongly felt in all of her work. She was far from being a nanny with a photo hobby who happened to take enough pictures that some eventually turned out well. Instead, quite obviously, she was an artist with a keen eye and understanding of photography who happened to use her day job as a nanny to give her the freedom to live and create, seemingly exactly as she wished.
