In 2013, she became the subject of an Oscar-nominated documentary, which retold Maloof’s efforts to locate traces of the nanny-with-a-secret-passion-for-photography. A Flickr showcase of her archive attracted vast numbers of visitors, and the physical exhibitions that followed in Europe and North America were mobbed. After further sleuthing, he finally managed to give the anonymous photographer an identity: she was a former professional carer named Vivian Maier, who had since died, and who had kept her images – and her remarkable talent – all but hidden from everyone she knew.Īlthough she assiduously avoided the limelight during her lifetime, over the last decade Maier has become one of the biggest names in photography. Maloof managed to track down more work by the same hand – eventually amassing an archive of up to 100,000 negatives and some 3,000 prints, plus box upon box of film rolls, audio interviews, receipts, letters and countless personal effects. Not only had none of these images been seen before, no one had a clue who had taken them. Sorting through them, he realised he’d stumbled across something astonishing: charismatic, crisply composed pictures of the city in the 1950s and 60s, which ranked with the best US street photographs of the period. In 2007, a Chicago history buff named John Maloof bought a box full of negatives on a whim at auction for $400. It was the kind of discovery that curators dream about during slow days at the museum.
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