%%USERNAME%%    %%ACCWORDS%% %%ONOFF%% |
 As the first blog entry got exhausted. My second book |
| Evolution of Love Part 2 |
| In 2007, a man bought a box of negatives at a Chicago auction for $400. Two years later, he scanned them. What he saw changed photographic history—and launched the career of a woman who'd been dead for months. John Maloof wasn't looking for art. He was looking for old pictures of Chicago for a history book he was writing about his neighborhood. In 2007, he walked into RPN Auctions on Chicago's Northwest Side and spotted a box labeled with vintage photographs from the 1960s. He couldn't examine the contents closely—it was a blind auction. He took a gamble and bought it for around $400. Back home, he and his co-author sorted through the negatives, searching for usable images of their neighborhood, Portage Park. Nothing fit. Disappointed, Maloof shoved the box in a closet and forgot about it. Two years later, in 2009, curiosity got the better of him. He pulled out the box and started scanning the negatives. What appeared on his computer screen stopped him cold. The photographs were extraordinary. Street scenes from Chicago and New York. Intimate portraits of strangers. Children playing. People caught in private moments. Compositions so perfect they looked staged—but they weren't. These weren't amateur snapshots. These were masterworks. Maloof had no background in photography. He couldn't articulate why the images were stunning—he just knew they were. He started researching who might have taken them. Hidden in the boxes was a name: Vivian Maier. Maloof Googled her. Nothing came up. Then, in late 2009, while still searching, he found something: an obituary. Vivian Maier had died on April 21, 2009—just months earlier. At age 83. In a nursing home in the Chicago suburbs. Maloof had missed her by half a year. Vivian Dorothy Maier was born on February 1, 1926, in New York City. She spent much of her youth in France before returning to the United States in 1951. She worked as a nanny. That's what she did for most of her life—raised other people's children in affluent North Shore suburbs of Chicago. She was eccentric. Stern. Intensely private. She locked her bedroom door obsessively. She hoarded belongings in storage units. She wore men's shoes and old-fashioned clothes. She walked with a heavy, distinctive gait. And she always—always—had a camera around her neck. A Rolleiflex, held at waist level, looking down into the viewfinder. On her days off, she'd wander the streets of Chicago and New York, photographing everything. Strangers. Street vendors. Children. Elderly people. Reflections in windows. Shadows on pavement. She'd take the children she cared for along, snapping photos while they played. The families she worked for remember her constantly shooting—click, click, click—but never showing anyone the results. She'd return from her walks with rolls and rolls of film. She'd develop some in makeshift darkrooms, storing the negatives in boxes. But most of the film she never developed at all. Over five decades—from the 1950s through the 1990s—Vivian Maier accumulated more than 150,000 photographs. She never exhibited a single one. Never sold a print. Never entered a contest. Never showed her work to a gallery. Some of the children she cared for remember asking to see her photographs. She'd refuse. "Maybe someday," she'd say. But someday never came. Why? Nobody knows for certain. Some who knew her said she was too private, too protective of her work. Others remember her expressing frustration—wanting recognition but never pursuing it. In one letter discovered after her death, Maier wrote about her desire to share her work with the world. But she never did. In the late 1990s, Vivian's life began to unravel. She was aging, working less, struggling financially. She rented storage units to keep her possessions—boxes and boxes of negatives, undeveloped film, personal items, collected ephemera. By the mid-2000s, she couldn't afford the storage fees anymore. In 2007, the storage company auctioned off her belongings for non-payment. Several Chicago collectors bought boxes. John Maloof got one. So did Ron Slattery and Randy Prow and Jeffrey Goldstein. None of them knew what they had. By 2008, Vivian was homeless, then living in a small apartment paid for by former employers—three brothers whose family she'd worked for decades earlier. They remembered her with affection and didn't want her on the streets. In November 2008, Vivian slipped on ice and hit her head. She was hospitalized, but never fully recovered. She was moved to a nursing home. On April 21, 2009, Vivian Maier died. She was buried in a ravine covered with wild strawberries—a place she'd loved, near the home of a family whose children she'd cared for in the 1960s. She died unknown. Poor. With no idea that boxes of her life's work were sitting in strangers' basements. Six months later, in October 2009, John Maloof posted some of Vivian's photographs on Flickr. The response was instant and overwhelming. Thousands of people responded. Photography experts were stunned. How had nobody heard of this woman? How had this work stayed hidden? Maloof became obsessed. He tracked down the other auction buyers and spent approximately $70,000 over the next year purchasing their boxes—ultimately reconstructing about 90% of Vivian's archive. He found former employers. Former neighbors. The children she'd cared for, now adults. He traveled to France to find a distant cousin—the closest living relative—to negotiate copyright. He spent months scanning negatives, researching Vivian's life, piecing together her story. The more he uncovered, the more mysterious she became. Some families remembered her as wonderful—inspiring, creative, taking children on adventures, teaching them about art and the world. Others remembered her as frightening—volatile, sometimes cruel, psychologically complex. She'd used different names with different families. Different accents. She kept her past deliberately obscure. Nobody really knew her. But her photographs? They revealed someone who saw the world with extraordinary clarity and compassion. In 2013, Maloof co-directed a documentary about Vivian called Finding Vivian Maier. It was nominated for an Academy Award. By then, Vivian's photographs were being exhibited in major galleries worldwide. Prints were selling for thousands of dollars. Museums were acquiring her work. Critics were calling her one of the great street photographers of the 20th century—on par with Henri Cartier-Bresson, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus. The nanny with the Rolleiflex camera had become a posthumous sensation. Today, her work hangs in museums and galleries around the world. Books of her photographs have been published. Retrospectives have been mounted in Paris, New York, Chicago. Scholars study her compositions, her eye, her ability to capture fleeting moments of humanity with stunning precision. She never exhibited. Never sold. Never received a single review during her lifetime. She died poor, unknown, and alone. But her genius was there all along—hidden in boxes, waiting in the dark. In 2007, a man bought a box of negatives for $400, looking for pictures for a neighborhood history book. Instead, he found 150,000 reasons why Vivian Maier deserved to be remembered. She spent five decades photographing the world in secret—never showing anyone, never seeking recognition, never even developing most of her film. She died six months before her work went viral. She never knew. Never saw a gallery opening. Never read a review. Never heard someone call her a genius. But the photographs speak for themselves. And sometimes, that's enough. Vivian Maier proved that great art doesn't need an audience to be great—it just needs to exist. That recognition isn't what makes work valuable—the work itself is what matters. That you can spend a lifetime creating in obscurity and still change the world—even if you never live to see it. Her lens captured 150,000 moments of human life. She never showed a single one. But now, decades after her death, millions of people have seen her vision. Sometimes the quietest voices echo the loudest. |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
Puzzle Hub
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
