News Center- Vivian Maier was born in New York City on February 1, 1926. Her father was Austrian and her mother was French. She spent most of her childhood in France. She took her first photograph in 1940 in France. Her first camera was a modest Kodak Brownie box camera with one shutter speed, no aperture, and focus control. She returned to the United States in 1951, first living in New York City and in 1956 moving near Chicago. She accepted a job as a nanny for the Gensburg family. She spent her days off walking the streets of Chicago and taking photographs. She usually used a Rolleiflex camera. Street photographer Vivian Maier’s photographs were unknown and unpublished during her lifetime. Her works were discovered and recognized after her death. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime. The number of her photographs is still unknown.

She left behind thousands of photographs

She photographed the urban human landscape for more than 30 years. Her preferred subjects were children, the poor, the marginalized, and the elderly, some of them aware of her and some not. She worked in a black-and-white documentary style until early 1970. Then, she took up color and also began to adopt a more abstract approach. Vivian Maier, who did not show the photographs she took to anyone, left behind thousands of photographs.

Vivian Maier, who kept the negatives she took according to their dates, also kept the newspapers published on the same dates in the same boxes. She also recorded audiotapes of conversations she had with people she photographed. “Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever. We have to make room for other people. It’s a wheel. You get on, you have to go to the end. And then somebody has the same opportunity to go to the end and so on,” Vivian Maier says.

A Chicago collector, John Maloof bought a box of undeveloped rolls of film and negatives for $400 at an auction house and discovered the first negatives of Vivian Maier in 2007. The box was auctioned off as part of a group of items that had been collected from a storage unit sold for non-payment. John Maloof saw the name of Vivian Maier on the box. John Maloof has about 100,000 negatives, more than 3,000 prints, hundreds of rolls of film, home movies, and audio interviews of Vivian Maier.

Vivian Maier is considered one of the 20th century's greatest street photographers. In November 2008, she fell on the ice and hit her head. She was taken to a hospital but failed to recover. In January 2009, she was transported to a nursing home in the Chicago suburbs and she died there on April 21, 2009.