Vivian Maier was an American street photographer. Maier worked for about forty years as a nanny, mostly in Chicago’s North Shore, pursuing photography during her spare time. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of New York City, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
In 2007, two years before she died, Maier failed to keep up payments on storage space she had rented on Chicago’s North Side. As a result, her negatives, prints, audio recordings, and 8 mm film were auctioned. John Maloof, who was working on a book about Chicago history, purchased 30,000 negatives of Maier’s work in one such auction. Astounded by the quality of the work, Maloof began to publish the photos online and in 2013 a documentary, ‘Finding Vivian Maier’ was released, the trailer for which appears below…