Vivian Maier, an American photographer, died before she saw most of her work, let alone before she knew how many people would come to know her work. She was born on February 1, 1926, in New York City and died when she was 83 years old on April 21, 2009, in Chicago.
Vivian was born to a famous photographer mom (Maria Jaussaud) and a deadbeat dad. She travelled with her mom to France twice in her early life. The second time she visited she bought her first camera, a Kodak Brownie. This camera was cheap and didn’t give the photographer much freedom as it was hard to see exactly what she was taking a picture of. She continued to play around with the camera until she left France, this time without her mom, to go back to New York.
She stayed in New York for about five years, taking pictures of course, until moving for the last time to Chicago, where she would spend the rest of her life. While in Chicago, she nannied for the Gensburg family. The Gensburgs supported her greatly during her time working for them and she became a part of the family. She took photos in her free time and during this time she had access to a dark room, a room dedicated to developing film, so she saw the pictures that she took during this time. It wasn’t until the kids of the family grew up, making her of no use, that her undeveloped film started to pile up.
Since she was out of a job, she was forced to find new ones to support her. She floated around from job to job, nannying for different families, and even flirted with homelessness. She continued to take photos, and this is the time when her undeveloped film started to pile up, staying in that pile until after she was already dead. Since she had no permanent place of residence, she bought a storage unit where she stored all her undeveloped film, along with a minimum amount of her personal items.
Because the government is unkind to people under the poverty line, the state sold her possessions in the storage unit in 2007 to Roger Gunderson under the guise of payment issues. Gunderson then auctioned off the possessions to multiple people, but the most important person in this context is the man by the name of John Maloof.
Maloof was left with most of her undeveloped film, but upon doing a google search of Vivian Maier, found out that she had died in 2009 due to a head injury. She left behind an exuberant amount of film, but little to no close friends. Maloof was left with the question of what to do with the film. He decided to develop the film and he was blown away. The photos immediately resonated with him, powerful but simple pictures depicting the mundane street life of Chicago. Vivian chose to mostly photograph the underrepresented, that being the poor, women, children, and people of color. Maloof knew that he needed to get these photos out into public awareness, so he decided to make a blog where he would archive her photos and he worked to archive, promote, and publish all the photos that were left in his hands.
To Vivian, it wasn’t about becoming famous off her work. She did photography because she was passionate about it, and it was what she loved doing. And I think that that’s something we can take away from her story, along with her breath-taking pictures. She created art because she loved to do it, and that’s as good of a reason as any.
See more of her work and learn more about her here: http://www.vivianmaier.com