There is, however, something fundamentally unsettling with this proposition - after all, a human being is a constantly evolving open question rather than a definitive answer, a fluid self only trapped by the labels applied from without. Without the creator to reveal her motives and her craft, we are left to piece together the life and intent of an artist based on scraps of evidence, with no way to gain definitive answers.

Only after Maier’s death in 2009 did her remarkable work gain international acclaim - exhibitions were staged all over the world, magnificent monograph of her photographs published, and a documentary made.īut it wasn’t until 2013 that the most intimate and revealing of her photographs were at last released in Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits ( public library) - a collection befitting the year of the “selfie” and helping to officially declare this the season of the creative self-portrait.Īs secretive as Vivian Maier was in life, in death her mystery has only deepened. Mesmerized, Maloof began tracking down more of Maier’s work and amassed more than 100,000 negatives, thousands of prints, 700 rolls of undeveloped color film, home movies, audio interviews, and even her original cameras. They turned out to be the work of a mysterious nanny named Vivian Maier, who made a living by raising wealthy suburbanites’ children and made her life by capturing the world around her in exquisite detail and striking composition. In 2007, 26-year-old amateur historian and collector John Maloof wandered into the auction house across from his home and won, for $380, a box of 30,000 extraordinary negatives by an unknown artist whose street photographs of mid-century Chicago and New York rivaled those of Berenice Abbott and predated modern fixtures like Humans of New York by decades.

Vivian maier art