Jeff Holt — Chicago Nanny - One of the worlds greatest...

Chicago Nanny - One of the worlds greatest photographers?

Imagine living your whole life just doing what you loved - capturing the world around you with a camera. One year after your death and by accident your entire body of work is discovered and shared with the world via flickr and the internet. Just one year after your death you are being talked about as potentially one of the most prolific street photographers to have ever existed. Well that is the story of Vivian Maier who was born in 1929 and died just last year. She was a nanny in Chicago and had a staggering 100,000 negatives with some 20-30,000 still undeveloped. This story is absolutely amazing and beyond inspiring. She had a brilliant eye and keep in mind that the overwhelming majority of her work is still unscanned or undeveloped. Read the excerpt from a blog that has been set up about her and the evolving discovery of her work. I can’t wait to see how this story unfolds!!

http://vivianmaier.com

“I acquired Vivian’s negatives while at a furniture and antique auction. From what I know, the auction house acquired her belongings from her storage locker that was sold off due to delinquent payments. I didn’t know what ‘street photography’ was when I purchased them.

It took me days to look through all of her work. It inspired me to pick up photography myself. Little by little, as I progressed as a photographer, I would revisit Vivian’s negatives and I would “see” more in her work. I bought her same camera and took to the same streets soon to realize how difficult it was to make images of her caliber. I discovered the eye she had for photography through my own practice. Needless to say, I am attached to her work.

After some researching, I have only little information about Vivian. Central Camera (110 yr old camera shop in Chicago) has encountered Vivian from time to time when she would purchase film while out on the Chicago streets. From what they knew of her, they say she was a very “keep your distance from me” type of person but was also outspoken. She loved foreign films and didn’t care much for American films.

Some of her photos have pictures of children and often times it was near a beach. I later found out she was a nanny for a family on the North Side whose children these most likely were. One of her obituary’s state she lived in Oak Park, a close Chicago suburb but, I later found she lived in the Rogers Park neighborhood, in Chicago.

Out of the more than 100,000 negatives I have in the collection, about 20-30,000 negatives were still in rolls, undeveloped from the 1960’s-1970’s. I have been successfully developing these rolls. I must say, it’s very exciting for me. Most of her negatives that were developed in sleeves have the date and location penciled in French (she had poor penmanship).

I found her name written with pencil on a photo-lab envelope. I decided to ‘Google’ her about a year after I purchased these only to find her obituary placed the day before my search. She passed only a couple of days before that inquiry on her.

I wanted to meet her in person well before I found her obituary but, the auction house had stated she was ill, so I didn’t want to bother her. So many questions would have been answered if I had.”