Who Is Vivian Maier?

It’s a story that started at an auction house in Chicago in 2007, where John Maloof was looking for high quality vintage photographs for a project he was working on. It was there that he purchased a box of negatives by Vivian Maier for $400. The negatives, and the artist responsible for them, became a subject of fascination for Maloof, who managed to track down the rest of her work: about 100,000 to 150,000 negatives, more than 3,000 prints, and hundreds of rolls of film, Super 8 movies and audio recordings. And from there, as he organised public exhibitions of her work, he started to track down people that knew Maier and could tell him her story.

That story has become the feature documentary Finding Vivian Maier, co-directed by Maloof and Charlie Siskel. In the doco Maloof uncovers the shadowy figure of Maier, a photographer who spent her day-to-day life working as a nanny, and whose work only came into the public eye following her death. He did this not just through interviews with the children she looked after, her employers and acquaintances, but through examining her photographs and her possessions, including a mountain of newspapers, notebooks and receipts.

This was “the sort of material that we would sift through as the detective story was unfolding,” Siskel says. “That was the idea for how to structure the film as a kind of detective story, almost like an archaeological dig, sifting through all these things Vivian left behind to try to form a portrait of her… trying to create order out of the chaos that’s left behind. In this case it was all the more intriguing because Vivian was mysterious and so full of contradictions; she’s a brilliant photographer but she’s not known as a photographer, people only seemed to know her as a nanny. The families that knew her, they didn’t know her; she was only the help, really… It may not be entirely surprising that Vivian didn’t tell them so much about her past or her true ambitions and her artistic ambitions. They seem not to have really asked about all those pictures. They now express surprise about it but they noticed the camera, they all say she always had a camera on, but maybe they didn’t ask to see the photographs. Maybe that’s why she didn’t show them.”

In the eyes of Maloof and Siskel, Maier is one of the great street photographers of the 20th century, capturing images of the disenfranchised and telling stories about “someone sitting alone eating a sandwich on a park bench”. “She was a brilliant artist who happened to be a nanny by day. Being a nanny was merely a kind of disguise, a thing that allowed her to pursue her true calling which was her art.”

In cinemas 6 Nov