28 • The Sunday Times Magazine
I
n 2007 an estate agent and local historian
named John Maloof bought a box of
negatives at a Chicago auction. He hoped
to find old snaps to include in a book
about his neighbourhood; instead he
accidentally discovered one of the 20th
century’s greatest street photographers.
Vivian Maier worked as a nanny for more
than 40 years, caring for upper-class children
in New York and Chicago. She was rarely
without her Rolleiflex camera, capturing
more than 150,000 images of everyday life
from the 1950s to the 1970s. But Maier was
intensely private and few saw the results of
her work in her lifetime. Her rediscoveredphotos went viral online in October 2009
— six months after her death aged 83.
This month her photographs will be
displayed in the UK for the first time at the
MK Gallery in Milton Keynes. Anthony Spira,
the MK director, calls her story “extraordinary”,
saying that Maier “is now hailed as one of the
greatest recorders of American life in the
20th century, cementing her place in the
history of photography alongside Helen
Levitt, Diane Arbus and Robert Frank” ■Vivian Maier: Anthology is showing at
the MK Gallery, Milton Keynes, from
June 11 to September 25; mkgallery.orgBelow: a young
man rides a horse
beneath the El, New
York City’s elevated
railway, in 1953