Revealed: Treasure trove of amazing pictures that were kept hidden from the world

Revealed: Treasure trove of amazing pictures that were kept hidden from the world

 

• Photographer who ventured into gritty areas was a real-life Mary Poppins
• Vivian Maier's collection was never shown to anyone
• Strange double life of a highly-secretive artist
  

She scoured the streets day and night, venturing into strange and sometimes dicey neighbourhoods. She wore a hat, sturdy shoes and a camera, always a camera, around her neck and at the ready.

A woman in a white fur stole and evening dress drifting in the darkness toward a '56 two-tone Chevy. Click. A curious little boy, undaunted by his size, using an empty window frame as a ladder so he can peek into a giant box. Click. A huddled coil of a man defeated by life, his clothes soiled and tattered, his head hanging in despair. Click.

Fractions of seconds, captured by Vivian Maier a half century ago or more - fleeting moments of life on the streets at a time when men wore fedoras and dragged on Lucky Strikes, when women favored babushkas, when families piled in Studebakers and DeSotos for Sunday drives.

'Mary Poppins': An undated and untitled self portrait of Vivian Maier, who worked as a nanny when she wasn't taking amazing street photos

Maier observed it all without judgment. This was her hobby, not her job. But over the decades, it also was her life. She shot tens of thousands of photos. Most were never printed. Many weren't even developed. And few were seen by anyone but her.

Vivian Maier wanted it that way. She guarded her privacy so zealously that she didn't even want people to know her full name.

She and her photos seemed destined for obscurity until a young man with an eye for bargains stopped by an auction house one day. He paid about $400 for a huge grocery box stuffed with tens of thousands of negatives.

He knew only that they came from a repossessed storage locker that had been rented by an elderly woman.

He carted the negatives home, not expecting much - maybe just some illustrations for a history book he was co-authoring about his Northwest Side neighborhood. He didn't find any. But he did unearth a far bigger treasure.

John Maloof had stumbled upon an undiscovered artist whose photography is now being compared to the giants, a reclusive woman who, in death, is attracting the kind of attention and acclaim she would have shunned in life.

 

Rough and tumble: Two unidentified boys are pictured in an undated shot by Vivian Maier, who often frequented poor neighbourhoods to take pictures

Maloof knew nothing about photography - he was a real estate agent - but when he started scanning some of the negatives in his computer, even a novice could see they were special.

He decided to collect as much of her work as he could find. He contacted folks who'd bought Maier's other possessions at the auction that day in late 2007. Soon, he owned 1,000 rolls of her film.  

Maloof set out to learn more about Vivian Maier. He discovered through an obituary in the Chicago Tribune that she had died just days earlier.

'Vivian Maier, proud native of France and Chicago resident for the last 50 years died peacefully. ... A free and kindred spirit who magically touched the lives of all who knew her. Always ready to give her advice, opinion or a helping hand. Movie critic and photographer extraordinaire ...'

 

Wealth of material: From 1955, this Maier shot of a woman in a veil and fur coat was titled Uptown West, New York, N.Y.

 

Her 83 years on earth, summed up in 96 words.

Maloof, 29, tracked down two of the brothers who posted the the obituary - Lane and Matt Gensburg.

Vivian Maier, it turned out, had two distinct identities: A nanny for the Gensburgs and several other families in a 40-year career on the affluent North Shore. And before, during and after work, a photographer who chronicled the gritty drama and tender moments of street life in and around Chicago. She was fiercely independent. Eccentric. Opinionated. Private, yet confrontational.

'She came on strong,' Maren Baylaender says of Maier, who was hired by her husband to care for his disabled daughter during the late 1980s and early '90s. 'Whatever she had to say was more like a statement than a discussion.'

She had opinions about everything: Native Americans? They'd gotten a raw deal. Women? Just as capable as men. Marriage? No thanks.

Artistic: A 1954 photograph of a man on a horse titled August 11, 1954, New York, N.Y.

'I called her Mrs. once and she said, "It's MISS Maier and I'm proud of it,"' recalls former talk show host Phil Donahue, who hired her as a housekeeper for his four teenage sons when he lived on the North Shore in the '70s.

The Gensburg sons, now in their 50s, helped Maloof by opening a giant storage locker packed with Maier's trunks, clothes, negatives, 8-mm films, audio tapes - and a birth certificate showing she'd been born in 1926 in New York (not in France, as the obituary said) to a French mother and Austrian father.

'The best way I could describe her was she was like Mary Poppins,' says Lane Gensburg.

 

All dolled up: This 1957 photograph showing a woman in a white fur stole and evening dress was titled January 9, 1957, Florida."

'I think she could actually communicate with children much better than she did with adults,' he says. 'She did amazing things with us, things out of the ordinary.

'She was a free spirit - that's the only way you can really describe her. She had no real interest in material possessions.'

Maier's photos range from 1949 to the mid-1990s. Mostly, her black-and-white images depict the poor, women (especially well-dressed dowagers) and children. After switching to color in the mid- to late '70s, she turned to graffiti, as well as inanimate objects such as soda cans, headlines - and garbage.

 

Uptown: A shot from September 1959 depicting life on the streets of New York and titled September 28, 1959, 108th St. East, New York, N.Y.

Shortly after Maloof started buying Maier's film, he tried to interest galleries and museums, to no avail. Then he posted a blog he'd created featuring her work on Flickr, the online photo-sharing site and asked: 'What do I do with this stuff? ... Is this type of work worthy of exhibitions, a book? ... Any direction would be great.' Ideas and encouragement poured in.

This winter, Maloof finally succeeded in getting a one-woman show for Maier at the Chicago Cultural Center - her U.S. debut.

 

Curious glance: An image of a woman standing next to a bus was titled Sept., 1956, New York, N.Y.

On a snowy opening night, Maier's work was honored in the city that had been her photographic canvas; Maloof beamed as more than 1,000 people filed through the exhibit - including the Gensburgs.

Now he's assembling a book of her photos.

After Vivian Maier died in April 2009, the Gensburg boys - joined by their mother - returned to the North Shore woods where their adventurous nanny had taken them to pick strawberries.

This time, though, they read psalms and scattered her ashes in the spring air.

 

Old school: An undated photo of a man wearing a hat and carrying a newspaper, titled Chicago, Ill.

 

Memory lane: Lane Gensburg, whose family hired Vivian Maier as their nanny when he was a boy, at the exhibition of her work in Chicago