Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, published by powerHouse Books in 2011, edited by John Maloof, with a foreword by Geoff Dyer.

The photo book is a collection of 100 duotone street photographs taken during the 1950s in New York and Chicago, as far as I can tell. Vivian Maier’s story is as interesting and mysterious as her large, extraordinary body of work.

Vivian Maier is an enigma and one of the best street photographers, shoulder to shoulder with Helen Levitt and Henri Cartier-Bresson. What we currently know of Vivian is that she was born in New York and spent her youth between the U.S. and France. In 1951, at age 25, she moved from France to New York. By 1956, she had settled in Chicago, where she worked as a professional nanny for 40 years.

With a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex (TLR) medium-format camera, she made over 100,000 negatives between the 1950s and 1990s, in Chicago, New York, and elsewhere. Later in her life, she became destitute and was taken care of by the Gensburg brothers, whom she had looked after as children. She had kept her vast collection of negatives, prints, and unexposed film in storage units. After failed payments, those units went to auction. In 2007, two years before her death, John Maloof, Ron Slattery, and Randy Prow bought them, discovered her body of work, and began publishing it.

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is one of the only photo books in my library that the photographer did not compile or curate herself. I really appreciate that these three men exposed the world to Maier’s photography, which otherwise would never have been seen. On first viewing, however, the sequencing, presentation, printing, and selection of photos—with no context or depth—show the lack of John Maloof’s understanding of photography.

Despite its flaws, Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is visually arresting, emotionally resonant, and produced with care. It serves as an introduction. It draws you in, it inspires, and it leaves you wanting more.