Vivian  Maier 

Vivian Maier

New York, 1936 - Chicago, 2009

Born from an American father and a French mother, at her parents’ separation, Vivian was hosted, together with her mother Maria, by a photographer friend, Jeanne Bertrand, who lived in the Bronx. It was she who transmitted the passion for photography to her.

After returning to France for a short time, mother and daughter went back to the United States where Vivian started to work as a nanny with various families. Next to this activity that provided her a sustenance, the young woman began to cultivate a passion for photography, to provide documentary evidence of the places she visited. 

Her longest stay was at a family from Chicago, the Gensburg’s since 1956: she looked after their three children for seventeen years, taking pictures of the city and its inhabitants, children, beggars, famous people ….in her free time  … her photos are real ante litteram “street photos” and Vivian can be considered a forerunner of this photographic genre.

She takes care of other people’s life  for work reasons …..and she is interested in people’s lives peeping and telling  - hidden behind her Rolleiflex frame – stories through details, hands, gestures, gazes ……..

The discovery of this “invisible” artist is in itself a story within a story. Infact, Vivian Maier and the huge quantity of her negatives have been found out thanks to John Maloof’s tenacity, an American too, son of a second-hand dealer. In 2007 the young man, as he wanted to do a research about the city of Chicago, decided to buy  at an auction the content of a box full of the most diverse objects for 380 dollars, expropriated by law from a woman who had stopped paying rental fees. While putting the various objects in order, Maloof found a box containing hundreds of negatives and rolls still to be developed. This is how he discovered that the author of the photos was Vivian Maier, a nanny who for all her life had told  what she had seen through images, with a particular technique: a lot of her photos are self-portraits made by using mirrors or shop windows as reflective surfaces.

Her life has been compared to Emily Dickinson American poetess’ who wrote her reflections and her poems without ever publishing them and, on the contrary, sometimes by hiding them in unexpected places where they were found only after her death.

The life of this “nanny who changed the history of photography” (Vanity Fair) was outstanding, just by being “silent” and “invisible”.