Finding Vivian Maier • Messy Nessy

Self Portrait, Vivian Maier

“Picture this: quite possibly the most important street photographer of the 20th century was a 1950s children’s nanny who kept herself to herself and never showed a single one of her photographs to anyone. Decades later in 2007, a Chicago real estate agent and historical hobbyist, John Maloof purchased a box of never-seen, never-developed film negatives of an unknown ‘amateur’ photographer for $380 at his local auction house.

John began developing his new collection of photographs, some 100,000 negatives in total, that had been abandoned in a storage locker in Chicago before they ended up at the auction house. It became clear these were no ordinary street snaps of 1950s & 60s Chicago and New York and so John embarked on a journey to find out who was behind the photographs and soon discovered her name: Vivien Maier.

Before he could reach her, to John’s great dismay, he found her obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune in 2009. She had slipped on some ice the previous winter, suffered from a head injury and never fully recovered. She was 83 years-old.”