VIVIAN MAIER: Eye of a century, hidden in nanny's frumpy clothes? Two filmsFor my full review go here. On November 25, 2008, in Chicago,
Vivian Maier, an aging, impoverished, frumpily dressed spinster with a strange accent and a forbidding manner, a former nanny of mysterious origins, slipped on the ice and hit her head. She was in her eighties, and the injury had fatal consequences. Shunted between hospitals and nursing homes thereafter, she never recovered, dying five months later. Before this, in 2007, her rental on storage spaces went into arrears. She kept her photos, and many other things in these rental lockers, because she was a pack rat. The company sold off the contents, five lockers jammed with stuff, which were bought by Roger Gunderson, an auctioneer, for $250. He dumped some of the papers. That was a mistake, because after several people randomly bought up boxes of photos and negatives in the collection and put some on the Internet, Vivian Maier was spotted as an artist of great talent -- perhaps one of the great street photographers of the twentieth century.
In the "Art" section of this website
here I discuss Vivian Maier, the phenomenon of her sudden fame in the past five years, and the two feature documentaries so far made about her. The shorter film, available on VOD from Amazon
here, (from a longer BBC version) turns out to be clearer and a better consideration of this discovered photographer's working methods and abilities. But the one by and about John Maloof, who has become the major owner of Maier's legacy, is an energetic pursuit of information. He tracked down many of the people Maier cared for as children and depicts his own trajectory as a discoverer of her work, but he is protective of his position, avoiding mention of other dealers and collectors.
We have so far seen only a fraction of the over 150,000 images by Vivian Maier that have been found. Here are a few of those one can find online:
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