MAIER, Vivian

About the US-American photographer Vivian MAIER (1926-2009)

"Vivian Dorothy MAIER was an American citizen of French descent, nanny, housekeeper and amateur photographer. She only became known shortly after her death through the accidentally discovered, involuntarily auctioned legacy of an unusually large number of black and white photographs. Her exclusive, obsessively private passion was the discreet photographic documentation of life on the streets of the big cities of New York and Chicago. Apart from their status as culturally and historically significant contemporary documents of the second half of the 20th century, her pictures are currently classified in the non-specific category of street photography and continue to attract great interest from gallery owners and lovers of the genre worldwide. Critical voices criticize a legally and morally questionable, posthumously interest-driven creation of legends and commercialization of her person and her pictures, as Vivian MAIER was a determined loner throughout her life; who emphatically kept herself and her special activities out of the public eye." (slightly adapted text, © Wikipedia, last accessed on 07.12.2023)

Photography books and secondary literature on the life and work of Vivian MAIER

• 'Vivian Maier: Street Photographer' (2011, by John Maloof); 'Out of the Shadows' (2012, by Richard Cahan and Michael Williams); 'Self-Portraits' (2013, by John Maloof); 'Eye to Eye' (2014, by Cahan & Williams); 'Vivian Maier: A Photographer Found' (2014, by John Maloof ); 'The Color Work' (2014, with a foreword by Joel MEYEROWITZ and text by Colin Westerbeck); 'Das Meisterwerk der unbekannten Photographin' (2014, 2021, von Howard Greenberg); 'Vivian Maier: A Photographer's Life and Afterlife' (2017, by Pamela Bannos); 'Vivian Maier Developed: The Real Story of the Photographer Nanny' (2018, 2021, by Ann Marks, 2023 translated as 'The Life of Vivian Maier: The Nanny with the Camera'); 'Vivian Maier and the Mirrored Gaze: Photographic Positions on Images of Women in Self-Portraiture' (2019, by Nadja Köffler);