(New to Flickr? Learn how to share photos with a group.) We may choose your images to add to the archives of CPL's Special Collections and Preservation Division. Help us find the next critically acclaimed street photographer! Share your work, including selfies, on our Flickr group #VivianatCPL. Maier had died at 83, not knowing her work would become critically acclaimed and the subject of books and exhibitions.

He searched for information about Maier and discovered her obituary in the Chicago Tribune. Maloof posted the pictures on a photo website, where they soon received a great deal of attention. She was unable to pay the rental fee later in her life, and the unit was purchased at auction by John Maloof in 2007. Maier showed the images to no one and eventually stored the photographs and undeveloped film in a storage unit. Born on Februin New York, Vivian Maier was the child of European immigrants who had recently settled in the United States. Using a Rolleiflex camera, she wandered the streets of Chicago shooting images of everyday scenes and people, mostly on her days off from working as a nanny and housekeeper in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago. The self-portraits, more than eighty in number, take us on a journey through the streets of these metropolises.Born in New York and raised in Europe, Maier moved to Chicago in the mid-1950s. Reflections of her face or her shadow: every Vivian Maier self-portrait is an affirmation of her presence. They are abundant in her work, in a multitude of forms and variations, to the point that it almost becomes a language within her language a duality.

We see various recurring themes in her work: street scenes, portraits, the world of children, and a predilection for self-portraits. Her all-consuming photographic efforts eventually made her one of the most celebrated proponents of street photography. Her entire life was shrouded in anonymity until her body of photographic work came to light in 2007: more than 120,000 negatives, Super 8 and 16 mm films, audio recordings and more, which together form a previously-unexhibited collection that can now be explored for the first time.

She meticulously documented the world around her but rarely, if ever, created prints from her negatives, so her work was seen by almost no one during her lifetime. Over several decades from the early 1950s onward, Vivian Maier (1926-2009) worked as a nanny in New York and Chicago.

Vivian myers