For over 40 years, Vivian Maier worked as a nanny and spent her free time as a street photographer. Intensely private, she never showed her work to anyone, but left a legacy of over 100,000 negatives. These negatives were discovered by a local historian at an auction house in 2007 and since then her prints have been exhibited at museums from Los Angeles to Oslo. Lanny Silverman, a curator at the Chicago Cultural Centre, believes that “the best of [Vivian’s] work ranks up there with anybody. She covers humanist portraiture and street life, she covers children, she covers abstraction and she does them all with a style that I think digests the history of photography.”
Above are some examples of Vivian’s work. The photo at the top left is a self portrait taken in 1953. Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, the first book of her photography was published in 2011.
