A Nanny’s Diary

In 2007, a real estate agent, eBay peddler and amateur historian named John Maloof purchased 30,000 unattributed negatives on a hunch. This turned out to be the bulk of Vivian Maier’s undiscovered oeuvre, virtuosic street photographs taken by a reclusive Chicago nanny who died quietly in 2009 at age 83, just before her work went viral. She is now considered to be a lost master of the form, the Windy City’s own Helen Levitt. A giddy press has provided for her a whole slate of lofty comparisons: to Diane Arbus, Brassaï, Walker Evans and Weegee. Her eye for midcentury street fashion — fox stoles, bonnets and bird-cage veils — made her something of a proto-Sartorialist. But she could also slum it with street urchins, drooling bums and sideshow performers. Or mine the Loop late at night shooting perp walks. Suffice it to say, her work was not published in her lifetime, and “Vivian Maier: Street Photographer” (powerHouse, $40), edited by Maloof, is the first book on this important woman about whom so little is known. As Geoff Dyer puts it in his brief introduction, Maier “is someone who exists entirely in terms of what she saw.” Her photos, remarkable in their range, show an uncommon affinity with children, perhaps unsurprising given her work. “She was like Mary Poppins,” one of her charges from the 1960s recalled recently in Chicago Magazine. “She had an amazing ability to relate to children.” In a weird twist, Maier was hired briefly in the ’70s by the talk-show host Phil Donahue to care for his children. “I once saw her taking a picture inside a refuse can,” he said. “I never remotely thought that what she was doing would have some special artistic value.”