The film also set off a complex legal battle over the control of her work and legacy. Walking around New York City, Vivian Maier photographed people she saw on the street. As Chloë Ashby writes for the Art Newspaper, Maier quickly became a “landmark figure in 20th-century American photography.”
His 2013 documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, sparked intense interest in the previously unknown photographer and her work, launching her to posthumous fame. In 2007, Chicago real estate agent John Maloof bought one of those lockers, fell in love with the photographs inside and began a lengthy quest to learn more about Maier. Maier printed some of her own photographs and left many other rolls of film undeveloped, packing her work into suitcases and boxes, which she stashed in storage lockers. When asked personal questions, she often gave different versions of her backstory and often changed the spelling of her name.
Maier, secretive by nature, often holed up in the rooms her respective employers gave her inside their homes. She often took the children she cared for on “shooting safaris,” which involved wandering around on the streets, often through poor neighborhoods, while wearing “funny, old-fashioned” clothes, reports the Guardian’s Adrian Searle. She worked as a professional nanny for more than 40 years, during which she secretly took more than 150,000 photographs. The story of Maier’s rise to critical acclaim is just as compelling as her art. © Estate of Vivian Maier, Courtesy of Maloof Collection and Howard Greenberg Gallery, NY
While working as a nanny, Vivian Maier photographed scenes from everyday life. Maier photographed burning furniture, electric cables, children, housewives, unhoused individuals, abandoned toys-and nearly everything in between, all with a skill that “far surpassed that of any part-time hobbyist,” the gallery notes. The exhibition showcases Maier’s unique ability to capture everyday life-and infuse it with “wit, humor and (a) deep sense of humanity,” per the gallery. Now, her eclectic street-scene photographs are getting their first large-scale show in the United Kingdom.įeaturing more than 140 photographs, as well as audio and film clips, “ Vivian Maier: Anthology” is on view now at MK Gallery in Milton Keynes, a town some 55 miles northwest of London. More recently, Maier has slowly started gaining recognition for her work-and for her mysterious life. But her photography prowess was unknown until 2007, two years before her death, when she fell behind on payments for a storage locker and the belongings inside were auctioned off. For decades, Vivian Maier wandered around New York and Chicago, surreptitiously taking tens of thousands of photographs of people and scenes she encountered on the street.
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