Self portraits by Vivian Maier
I’m writing a series of blogs exploring the world of female photographers who have shaped the way we see the world by creating a legacy to reflect on.
I’ve chosen to start with Vivian Maier because of her fascinating story. Vivian was relatively unknown as a photographer until shortly before her death on April 21 2009.
Born on February 1st 1926 in New York City of French and Austro-Hungarian extraction Vivian spent most of her formative years in France.
Vivian returned to the U.S in 1951 where she took up work as a nanny. She had taken up the art of street photography two years earlier, refining her craft whilst out with the children and in her leisure time too. It was during this time she built up a vast library of images using her Rolleiflex (a twin lens reflex camera as seen in the photograph top left) on the streets of New York.
Vivian was fortunate to have had her own quarters at work where she used the bathroom as a darkroom to process and print the images. However these historical photographs were not shared with others and were for Vivian’s eyes only and locked away in storage lockers only to be discovered in 2007. Consistently taking photographs over the course of five decades, she would ultimately leave over 100,000 negatives, most of them shot in Chicago – where she moved to in 1956 continuing her work as a nanny and New York City.
An excert from a website about the life of Vivian Maier
‘A free spirit but also a proud soul, Vivian became poor and was ultimately saved by three of the children she had nannied earlier in her life. Fondly remembering Maier as a second mother, they pooled together to pay for an apartment and took the best of care for her. Unbeknownst to them, one of Vivian’s storage lockers was auctioned off due to delinquent payments. In those storage lockers lay the massive hoard of negatives Maier secretly stashed throughout her lifetime.’
I hope you have found the life of Vivian Maier as fascinating as I have?
You can find out more about the life of Vivian Maier via this website .
A contact sheet from Vivian Maier's archives.
“I knew she was talented but it's astonishing what she made of it,” Linda Matthews, who had hired Maier to watch her three children in a Chicago suburb in the 1980s, told the Guardian’s Susanna Rustin in 2014.
“Who could have imagined she could have left so much behind?"
Next time I will be exploring the world of Christina Broom 28 December 1862 – 5 June 1939 – a Scottish photographer, credited as "the UK's first female press photographer" who went on to photograph royalty.
Thanks for reading
Stella
