Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait (Undated) © Maloof Collection

This week I discovered the American photographer Vivian Maier (1926-2009). Her photos are incredible. They are a wonderful documentation of life in New York and Chicago in the middle of the 20th century. Her work is comparable in quality to some of the greatest photographers of the 20th century like Diane Arbus, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Gordon Parks. But here’s the thing: Maier never showed her photographs to anyone. And most of the photos she took she didn’t even get developed.

Maier wasn’t known to anybody in the art world before she died, although her reputation has been steadily increasing after a documentary about her life was released in 2013. Her work is also increasingly being exhibited around the world, including the first exhibition of her work in the UK at the MK Gallery in Milton Keynes this year. And that’s how she has come onto my radar.

Maier’s life story is very unusual. And it’s only through pure chance that we know about her at all. And that story goes like this:

In 2007 a young American called John Maloof was researching the local history of Chicago for a book he was writing. He went to a local auction to try and find some old photographs of Chicago neighbourhoods to include in the publication. At that auction there were some boxes of old photographic negatives, and he took a punt on them thinking he might be able to include some in his book.

What he bought were photographic negatives that Vivian Maier had stored in a lock-up. When Maier had fallen on hard times and the rent had lapsed on that lock-up, the storage company had cleared it out and put the contents up for sale to recoup their costs. That was the start of a research journey for Maloof that eventually led to what we know now about her today.

Maier was born in 1926 in New York, and died in desperate poverty in 2009 at the age of 83. Her parents were immigrants, her mother was French, and her father was Austrian. Through official records we know that her father was out of the picture quite early on. She and her mother moved between France and the USA several times in her childhood, and this accounts for the French accent that Maier never lost as an adult.

Eventually in 1951 she settled in the USA and spent most of her adult life working as a nanny in Chicago. She never married, she had no children, no home of her own, and she didn’t really have any friends. Maloof managed to track down some of the families she worked for as a nanny and they have described her as being quite eccentric and very guarded and private. No one ever really knew anything about her.

Vivian Maier, Self-Portrait (1953). © Maloof Collection

What we do know is that Maier first picked up a camera in 1949 when she was 23 years old, and from that moment she was hooked. The children she looked after are the main witnesses of her working practices, and we know what we know from their childhood memories. They have described how she always had a camera around her neck, and she would take them out in New York and Chicago on adventures, where she could find visual fodder for her photographs.

Vivian Maier, Untitled (New York), (Undated). © Maloof Collection

She was unknown during her lifetime, and worked as a nanny to support her passion for photography. It is only in the past 10 years that her work has seen the light of day. So far 100,000 negatives and 2,700 undeveloped rolls of film have been found.

If she had done this for a living, if she had made herself known, she surely would have been a very successful photographer. And it has made me think about the category of ‘artist’. She didn’t seem to be interested in exhibiting her work, or asserting herself as an artist. So does that mean that she was an artist or just a vernacular photographer, a serious hobbyist? What’s the difference? Can we call her an artist if she didn’t perceive herself to be one? I’d love to know your thoughts on this.