Vivian Maier: The Nanny Who Shot America
- Daniel Holland
- Jul 14
- 6 min read
Updated: Jul 20
In 2007, a young estate agent named John Maloof wandered into a Chicago auction house looking for some local photographs to illustrate a history book he was working on. With just $400 in hand and a gut feeling, he placed a blind bid on a box of negatives labelled only with vague hints of the 1960s. At the time, Maloof was president of a historical society on Chicago’s Northwest Side, a role that had him digging through flea markets and estate sales in search of visual treasures from the city’s past. But what he found that day would end up being one of the most extraordinary photographic discoveries of the 21st century.
The box was stuffed with black-and-white negatives, many of them from decades past, depicting street scenes, candid portraits, and slices of life in Chicago and beyond. Disappointed that the images didn’t fit his architectural theme, Maloof set them aside, forgotten in a closet. It wasn’t until two years later that curiosity got the better of him. He began scanning the negatives into his computer, frame by frame. And as he did, something remarkable unfolded: raw, honest, and often haunting images of city life, shot with a clarity and sensitivity rarely seen even in professional work.
He didn’t know it yet, but Maloof had stumbled upon the life’s work of a woman named Vivian Maier, a nanny with a camera and an eye for human detail that rivalled the greats. Her photographs captured the peculiar beauty of ordinary life: grimy storefronts, children playing in the street, old women clutching shopping bags, faces caught mid-thought, mid-frown, mid-smile. Maier had been everywhere and nowhere, hiding in plain sight behind a Rolleiflex camera while pushing a pram.
At the time, Maloof had no formal photography training. But he was so taken by Maier’s images that he bought a camera, took a photography class, and even set up a darkroom in his attic. His interest quickly became obsession, not just with photography, but with the mystery of the woman behind the lens.
When he finally Googled her name, the only thing that came up was a short obituary. Vivian Maier had died just before Maloof began his research. With the trail still warm, he started contacting the families who had employed her as a nanny. Their recollections painted a complex portrait: Maier was solitary, eccentric, fiercely private. Some remembered her as affectionate and whimsical; others described her as rigid and difficult. She often wore heavy coats and men’s shoes, preferred to go to the cinema alone, and was rarely seen without a camera around her neck.
As it turned out, Maloof had only purchased a portion of Maier’s archive. The contents of five storage lockers she had failed to keep up payments on had been auctioned off and split into lots by a local dealer named Roger Gunderson. Two other collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, had acquired portions of her work as well. But over time, Maloof painstakingly tracked down and bought back the bulk of Maier’s legacy. Today, he holds around 90% of her known work, including over 100,000 negatives, thousands of prints, hundreds of undeveloped rolls of film, and dozens of home movies and personal items.
The story didn’t stay quiet for long. Once John Maloof uploaded a small selection of Vivian Maier’s photographs to Flickr, something curious happened. People were mesmerised. The images struck a chord, not just with photography enthusiasts, but with anyone who had ever wandered through a city street and caught a stranger’s glance or noticed an odd juxtaposition of light, texture, and human expression. There was an authenticity in Maier’s work that cut through the noise.
Within days, comments flooded in. Viewers compared her instinctive eye and haunting intimacy to the likes of Diane Arbus, known for her portraits of society’s outsiders; Henri Cartier-Bresson, the pioneer of “the decisive moment”; and André Kertész, the poetic street observer. Yet Maier, unlike these canonical names, had lived and died in complete obscurity. She wasn’t part of any artistic movement, hadn’t studied under a master, and had never exhibited a single frame.
The buzz grew. Art bloggers began spreading the word. Soon, emails were arriving from gallery curators and photography scholars, eager to know more about the mysterious woman behind the lens. Inquiries from Europe came in first—curators from France and Germany asking if they could exhibit her work. American institutions quickly followed. Her first major exhibition took place in Chicago, and from there, it was a whirlwind: New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris, Berlin, and beyond. Audiences stood in quiet awe before her black-and-white portraits, strangers on buses, children in alleyways, old men in hats, mothers lost in thought. These were not posed or performed photographs. They were moments suspended in time, and they felt startlingly real.
The success wasn’t limited to galleries. Several books followed—Vivian Maier: Street Photographer, Out of the Shadows, and others—offering deeper dives into her vast archive. Each publication drew in more fans, more questions. Two major documentaries emerged: Finding Vivian Maier (2013), directed by John Maloof and Charlie Siskel, and Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny’s Pictures?, which aired on the BBC. Both films traced Maloof’s journey as he tried to piece together Maier’s life, combing through personal effects, letters, receipts, and film canisters, and tracking down the now-grown children she had once looked after.
Yet, for all this attention, Vivian Maier remains a deeply elusive figure. Despite leaving behind a staggering body of work—over 100,000 negatives, hundreds of undeveloped rolls, countless prints—she never printed the vast majority of it. Most of her photographs were never even developed. There’s no evidence she ever tried to sell her work, exhibit it, or even show it to friends. She left behind no artist’s statement, no diary entries about her process, and no real indication of what she thought about her own practice.
Some have interpreted this as humility, or shyness. Others see a woman who lacked confidence, or who feared rejection. And there are those who believe she knew exactly what she had, but preferred to remain the sole audience to her own vision. Perhaps she didn’t care about fame or recognition. Or perhaps she didn’t want the world to intrude on what had been, for her, a highly personal, almost meditative act of creation.
What we do know is this: Vivian Maier saw the world with extraordinary clarity. Her camera seemed to capture not just surfaces but inner lives—the flicker of doubt in a passer-by’s eye, the pride of a child on a tricycle, the weariness of a shopkeeper resting on his stool. Her compositions were rarely flashy or dramatic; instead, they carried a quiet power, an intimacy born of patience and empathy. She waited for life to happen in front of her, then clicked the shutter just as the story revealed itself.
In an age dominated by self-promotion and image curation, Maier’s archive stands in stark contrast. Her photographs are unfiltered, unbranded, and unstaged. They are, in many ways, more modern than most contemporary work, precisely because they’re not trying to be modern. They’re just honest. They invite us to slow down and look again, to see not just people, but human beings.
That she took these photographs while juggling jobs as a live-in nanny, often moving from family to family, city to city, only adds to the awe. She carried her camera everywhere, shooting on buses, in shopfronts, at beaches, in slums, on snowy corners, and in affluent neighbourhoods. Her life was modest, even precarious at times. Yet her vision was grand, layered, and urgent.
Vivian Maier never asked to be recognised, and it’s likely she never imagined that her work would one day hang in the same galleries as the greats. But thanks to a chance auction bid and one curious estate agent’s persistence, her name now sits comfortably among them. Her story, and the incredible archive she left behind, remind us that genius isn’t always loud. Sometimes, it’s found in the quiet click of a shutter and a dusty box in a secondhand sale.
And to think—it all started with a $400 box at a flea market.
Sources
“Finding Vivian Maier” (2013), directed by John Maloof & Charlie Siskel
The New York Times archives
“Vivian Maier: Street Photographer”, edited by John Maloof
Written by Holland.
Editor, UtterlyInteresting.com — exploring the strange, sublime, and forgotten corners of history.
