Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926. She worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago during the 50s and 60s. She lived an intensely private existence and created around 150,000 photographs many of them never developed as she could not afford to do so. She never shared those photographs with anyone and lost possession of them when her storage locker was sold off for non-payment.
At some point, around the beginning of the new millenium, Maier stopped making work, beset by financial difficulties. Homeless for a time, she was supported by a family that had once hired her as a nanny. She died, unnoticed and unsung, in 2009 aged 83, just two years after the discovery of her vast body of work and the beginning of her ongoing canonisation.
Although she assiduously avoided the limelight during her lifetime, over the last decade Maier has become one of the biggest names in photography.
When John Maloof purchased a box of Maier's negatives from a Chicago auction house a few years ago, this was the first time that any of her art saw the light of day. They are a moving, accurate, and at times, challenging, depiction of city life in America's post-war golden age.
Her work was exhibited in Britain for the first time in 2002, at MK gallery in Milton Keynes. Director, Anthony Spira, said: 'Vivian Mayer's story is an extraordinary one. The nanny who lives secretly as a world-class photographer whose remarkable work remained virtually unknown in her lifetime is now hailed as one of the greatest recorders of American life in the 20th century, cementing her place in the history of photoraphy alongside Helen Levitt, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank'.
