Vivian Dorothy Maier was an American amateur street photographer, often described as Mary Poppins with a camera. Born on February 1, 1926, in New York City to French/Austrian parents, she bounced between the U.S. and France during her childhood. In 1949, while living in France, Maier began experimenting with photography. Her first camera was a Kodak Box Brownie.

She was an intensely private person changing her name as she moved from family to family, calling herself Meyer, Mayer, Meier, Maier, or even Viv Smith.

Chicago

Maier returned to New York in 1951 on the Steamship De-grass’ and worked in Southampton as a nanny. In 1952 she purchased a German-made Rolleiflex camera. In 1956 Maier moved to Highland Park, a northern suburb of Chicago,  to accept a job as a nanny for the Gensberg family. While with the Gensbergs, she would venture out to the streets of Chicago with her medium format Rolleiflex to photograph the neighbourhoods. 

Years later, the three Gensberg boys she cared for recalled being taken to rough areas so their beloved nanny could pursue photography. At the Gensberg family home, she also had use of a darkroom.

Urban Human Landscape

Maier photographed the urban human landscape over three decades. Her preferred subjects were children, the poor, the marginalised, and the elderly, some of them aware of her and some not. She also made several self-portraits.  

Between 1959 and 1960, Maier embarked on a solo trip around the world, taking pictures in Los Angeles, Manila, Bangkok, Shanghai, Beijing, India, Syria, Egypt, and Italy.  

The Later Years

In the 1970s, with the children grown, Maier left the family and lost access to her darkroom. For a brief time in the 1970s, Maier worked as a housekeeper for talk-show host Phil Donahue. As she moved from family to family, her collection of rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to grow again. Maier had worked in a black-and-white documentary style until this time. However, she now switched to colour and adopted a more abstract approach. For her colour work, Maier stopped using the Rolleiflex and instead shot with her Leica and various German SLR cameras.

The colour work had an edge that hadn’t been seen in her work, becoming more abstract as time passed. Found objects, newspapers, and graffiti slowly replaced the people in her images. Her work also began to show a compulsion to save items she would find in garbage cans or lying beside the curb.

Hard Times

Now in her 70s, in the late 1990s, her financial situation worsened, and Maier put down her camera. Her belongings were placed in storage while she struggled to stay afloat. Finally, she became destitute and was about to be evicted from an apartment in Cicero. The Gensburg brothers banded together and arranged a small studio apartment for her in a better area.

In 2008, aged 82, she fell on a patch of ice in downtown Chicago, hitting her head. While she was expected to make a full recovery, her health began to deteriorate, forcing her into a nursing home. She passed away the following year in Illinois on April 20, 2009, aged 83. Maier had taken over 150,000 photographs in her lifetime.

The Maloof Collection

With Maier’s meagre means and the Gensberg brothers unaware of their existence, the storage locker containing her images was sold off due to non-payment of rent. The storage company auctioned off the negatives to RPN Sales. They, in turn, auctioned the boxes in a much larger auction to several buyers.

One of the buyers was  John Maloof, a twenty-five-year-old real estate agent. Maloof purchased 30,000 negatives, sight unseen, for $400. Maloof was looking for vintage images of Chicago for a book he was publishing. Realising the photos were not what he wanted, he closed the box and put it on a shelf. Two years later, he took another look and, going through the box, found an envelope with her name. Maloof googled the name and found her death notice published just a few days before. Since then, Maloof has continued to acquire her negatives and now owns around 100,000 of them. Estimates are that Maloof now owns about 90% of her work, with Jeffrey Goldstein owning the remainder.

The School of Art Institute in Chicago established the Vivian Maier Scholarship Fund to provide female students with additional financial resources. John Maloof endowed the scholarship from funds received from print sales and his film, directed by Charlie Siskel, Finding Vivian Maier. Howard Greenberg and Charlie Siskel also provided donations.

Epilogue

However, Maier’s story doesn’t entirely end there. With the newfound fame around her images plus the publicity and income they generated, lawyers and potential heirs started putting their hands up. John Maloof had tracked down an heir and paid them for copyright. However, another lawyer claimed to have found another cousin in France and asked the court to nominate that cousin instead as heir to Maier’s Estate. In 2019, Maier’s images printed posthumously from her original negatives went up for sale in London for between $5k to $6.5k each.

The Cook County public administrator in Chicago then took over what it considered an “unsettled estate”. A settlement was reached, allowing Maloof to continue to produce and exhibit the collection, keeping an undisclosed portion of the profits with the balance going to the Estate. So far, the exhibition has travelled through Europe and is currently in the U.K. until September 25.

Maloof was given the Estate’s blessing to make two significant donations to the University of Chicago to preserve Maiers’s legacy. The first donation was 500 prints in 2017, followed by another donation of 2,700 photographs in 2019. The prints will be held and made accessible to researchers allowing them to explore Maier’s printing process

Further Reading: Vivian Undeveloped: The Untold Story of the Photographer Nanny by Ann Mark

Note

The copyrights in the photography contained in this post are owned by the Estate of Vivian Maier. The Estate grants a limited license to media and press to reproduce the attached images in articles concerning Vivian Maier and/or John Maloof’s donation of vintage prints of Vivian Maier’s work to the University of Chicago. Hi-resolution versions of images may be used in connection with print versions of articles only. For electronic and online publications, the reproduced images may not exceed 1500 pixels on the longest side and 72 dpi. Unauthorised reproduction, distribution, or exhibition could result in liability under the Copyright Act. Publication of any of these images requires accompanying use of this notice: “Unpublished work © 2017 The Estate of Vivian Maier. All rights reserved.”