Vivian Maier, the invisible photographer
« American photographer (1926-2009), a nanny by trade whose clandestine work was discovered only after her death. »
Born in New York in 1926, daughter of a French mother, Vivian Maier worked her whole life as a nanny in Chicago. She photographed silently, mostly with a Rolleiflex, on the streets of New York then Chicago, from the 1950s to the 1990s. None of the families who employed her ever saw her prints.
In 2007, John Maloof, a 25-year-old real-estate agent, bought a box of negatives at auction, salvaged from an unpaid storage locker. Over 100,000 negatives. Vivian Maier would die two years later without knowing she had become famous. The 2014 documentary Finding Vivian Maier triggered the global phenomenon.
Her self-portraits in shop windows, her street scenes at child's height (the Rollei is held at waist level), her deeply humanist gaze raise one question: what would she have wanted done with it? The debate on posthumous rights and the ethics of "discovery" now accompanies every exhibition.