Pioneering Photographer's Work Discovered By Lucky Auction-Goer
LatestWhat we know of the story of Vivian Maier’s life and work, and of how 30,000 of her negatives came to be acquired at a Chicago estate auction by a 26-year-old real estate agent and amateur historian, is breathtaking.
Maier was born in New York City to a French mother and an Austrian father; her father left by the time Maier was four, and she grew up mostly in France, with intervals in New York. In 1951, at age 25, Maier returned to New York City, and worked in a rag trade sweatshop. She learned English from the movies, but retained her French accent. In 1956, she moved to Chicago and started working as a nanny. She held that position with various well-to-do North Shore families for the next forty years; she even nannied Phil Donahue’s kids for a while. On her days off, Maier would head out in the early morning on her moped, dressed in a man’s jacket and shoes and armed most often with a Rolleiflex camera, to shoot roll after roll of street scenes.
Click to enlarge
But it took two years before John Maloof, the real estate agent who discovered that cache of negatives, could even learn Vivian Maier’s name. In that time, Maloof realized that he had in his possession the artifacts of a major, and previously undiscovered, voice in American 20th Century photography — a woman who made careful notations of the dates and locations of her shots in longhand, and who left many self-portraits, but who hadn’t included any identifying information in the box he’d acquired. Inquiries at the auction house that had handled the sale of Maier’s effects, from storage units she’d stopped paying rent on, didn’t turn up any information about who she was. Maloof tracked down some of the other people who had bought Maier’s pictures at the auction and offered to buy what they had; he eventually came to own over 100,000 of her negatives. It was in one of these boxes that Maloof found an envelope from a print shop with the name “Vivian Maier” written on the back. Maloof Googled her; a death notice that had run one day earlier in the Chicago Tribune classifieds was the top hit. UPDATE: Turns out that story is too good to be true. A man named Ron Slattery, who is friends with Maloof, also bought some of Maier’s negatives at the auction in question. Slattery says he and Maloof both knew Maier’s name prior to her death, although they could not determine her whereabouts (turns out she was in a Chicago area nursing home), and that he and Maloof discussed their discoveries together frequently. In July, 2008, Slattery posted a number of Maier’s photographs to his blog, crediting Maier by name.