Finding Vivian Maier

Paradoxical.

- Bold. - Yeah.

Mysterious.

- Eccentric. - Eccentric.

- Private. - She was a very, very private woman.

I never had any idea she took pictures.

She would take photographs. Many, many photographs.

She would never have let this happen.

Is there anything that you wish you had done differently than...

Sure. I wish I would have found those negatives instead of you.

Ten dollars... Let's go harder. Ten bucks.

Then I'll have to end in five. So can I have...

It was winter 2007.

I'll have to go seven, anyone at seven? Seven and a half. Ten.

And ten, gotta go $10...

The auction house is across the street from my home.

I found this box that was loaded with negatives.

$70. 75 there... $80.

I was writing a history book, and I needed a lot of historic photos.

And so I would, like, you know, take the negatives and I'd look up into the light,

and I'd look for images of Chicago.

150, 160...

There were several boxes that went with the set.

I just went for the biggest one.

39 is your buyer, 39 is your buyer.

I won it for, I think it was $380.

The auction house told me the photographer,

her name was Vivian Maier.

Google searched her... nothing at all.

I mean, absolutely nothing.

So I just kind of gave up for a while.

I looked at some of the stuff that night,

and it was cool, but nothing worked for the book,

so I just put it in the closet.

I just had to figure out, what am I going to do with this stuff?

That's what sparked me to start scanning it.

I have a reflex, where we'll be driving somewhere,

and I'll just, like, spot something from down the road

that I know what it is and I know that it's valuable.

I grew up doing the flea markets with my brother.

My father did it. His father did it.

I would do storage auctions with my brother.

And he'd win some, and we'd clean 'em out.

We threw out tons of negatives.

Cos there's no value in negatives to most resale people.

And these negatives that I discovered, what I saw at first,

I didn't know if it was really good.

I knew that I thought it was good.

I contacted a couple of galleries.

I didn't know where to go.

I made a photo blog and I put about 200 images up.

I put a link on Flickr.

That post, it just went insane.

So I went on this mission to piece together the rest of her work.

And then, I found the other people who bought boxes,

and I bought their boxes.

And then I had all these negatives, like, insane amounts of negatives.

You always want to know who is behind the work.

I just knew her name was Vivian Maier.

Was she a journalist? Professional photographer?

"Let me just Google her name again to see if there's anything up."

And I found an obituary that was placed just a few days before that search.

I found an address in her stuff.

And after some, like, WhitePages searches,

I called, and I said,

"I have the work... the negatives of Vivian Maier."

And he was like, "Oh, that was my nanny."

That was his nanny.

Why is a nanny...

taking all these photos?

What they started to tell me about her

was... was strange.

He said, "She was kind of a loner.

"She didn't have any family that we knew of.

"She never had any love life or children that we knew of.

"But she was like our mother."

So it just caught my curiosity.

So what I said was, "Do you have any of her stuff?"

And they said, "Well, I've been keeping up the bills on her storage lockers.

"We wanna throw all the stuff out. She was a pack rat."

I said, "No, no, no, don't."

He's like, "You don't understand. She was a pack rat.

"We're gonna get a dumpster. You're welcome to come and help us.

"If you see anything that you like that we're gonna throw out, you can have."

I just wanted to go find out who she was. Just a quick thing.

I found this leather chest.

It was, like, taped shut with just, like, box tape or something.

And so we cut it and we opened it.

And it was filled to the top with rolls of undeveloped film.

I took one canister and I shook it, and it rattled.

So I opened it and there was teeth inside.

She had stuff wedged and hidden in everything that she had.

Almost like... it's like a secret little hiding spot for all of her little things.

A coupon, a note,

a flyer, bus passes, train cards.

Her hats. Shoes.

Her coats, her blouses.

I have uncashed income tax cheques from the government

amounting to thousands of dollars.

I have around 100,000 negatives.

I have 700 rolls of undeveloped colour film.

2,000 undeveloped rolls of black-and-white film.

I realised everything needs to be organised and scanned and archived.

But it was more than I could handle myself.

So I thought, "Let's see what the museums will do to help me.

"Maybe I could get this into MoMA. Maybe I could get this into Tate Modern."

I sent them... letters.

And here is the reply.

"Dear Mr Maloof, on behalf of the curators,

"I would like to thank you for thinking of the Department of Photography at MoMA.

"Unfortunately, the museum cannot accommodate

"these photographs at this time."

At that point,

I just figured, "I'm on my own.

"I'm gonna try to do an exhibition.

"I'm gonna do a book."

It's an insane amount of work.

I'm kind of compulsive with stuff.

I just wanted people to see this incredible work.

And I applied for a show at the Cultural Center in Chicago.

They said this was the biggest turnout for any artist they had ever had.

And then, the story just took off.

The history of street photography is being rewritten.

- Vivian Maier. - Vivian Maier.

- Vivian Maier. - Saved from obscurity.

In death, she is getting the fame that she never had in life.

John Maloof is still working his way through all Maier's negatives.

My mission is to put Vivian in the history books.

My first impression, when I saw the work,

was the kind of delight when a surprise comes your way

and you feel that somebody, hitherto undiscovered,

suddenly makes their work available and it looks good.

It looks like there's an authentic eye

and a real savvy about human nature

and photography, and the street,

and that kind of thing doesn't happen that often.

I see thousands of pictures. Day after day, people send me their websites to look at.

And when I flick through them, I feel most of them are undistinguished.

But Vivian's work instantly had those qualities of human understanding

and warmth and playfulness,

that I thought, "This is a genuine shooter."

She had a great eye.

And she... Great sense of framing.

- Here... this is the first one. I can't... - It's a muddy construction worker's butt.

Oh, my God!

She had a sense of humour.

And a sense of tragedy.

Beautiful.

Those photos of children are beautiful.

Beautiful sense of light, environment.

I mean, she had it all.

Was she very prolific? Did she shoot a lot?

In total, there's probably about 150,000 negatives.

She shot a lot.

She never showed her work to anybody?

That's what I'm trying to figure out. So far, no.

I think people would have loved her work.

I mean, I could even say, Robert Frank with a square format.

Lisette Model...

Helen Levitt, definitely.

Diane Arbus.

Some of the street portraits.

Had she made herself known, she would have become a famous photographer.

Something was wrong, something...

There's... there's a piece of the puzzle missing.

That's beautiful.

I really want to know, why did Vivian make these images?

What drove her to such compulsion,

to an obsessive degree, to take so many pictures?

Why were they never shown?

I started to unbox all of her stuff.

I'm finding leads.

You know, receipts that she had. But...

Her... Her receipts are from the '70s and '80s.

And in the '70s and '80s in Chicago,

there was no area code.

And I started calling these phone numbers, attaching every various area code.

773, 312, 708, 847, 630, 815...

Was she ever a nanny for a San Franciscan family?

- Yes. - Oh, my gosh.

Yes, she lived right next door.

I know Vivian Maier because she was my childhood nanny.

For about four years. Something like that.

Her job was as a housekeeper and a nanny.

Vivian was my nanny.

Vivian came into our lives when we needed a caretaker for my mother.

I was just staring at her, and I had thought,

"Where did my sister find this lady to baby-sit her kids?"

She was obsessed with just saving bits of memories,

of moments in time.

The stuff that she collected all helped me understand her a little better.

I have dozens of audio tapes that Vivian made.

I have around 150 8mm and 16mm movies.

I found pictures of Phil Donahue.

Like, in his home, petting a dog and at dinner.

I was a single parent in Winnetka, Illinois, with four sons.

Along comes Vivian.

I met her in a diner, to interview her

for this housekeeper job.

She took my picture.