Vivian Dorothea Maier was an American street photographer, who was born in New York City and spent much of her childhood in France. After returning to the United States, she worked for approximately forty years as a nanny in Chicago, Illinois.
During those years, she took more than 100,000 photographs, primarily of people and cityscapes in Chicago, although she traveled and photographed worldwide.
Two years before she died in 2009 at age 83, the eccentric and brilliant amateur photographer forfeited ownership of the contents of the storage lockers in which she had kept truckloads of negatives, prints and other materials.
The contents were quickly auctioned for a pittance to several collectors and “resellers” who found they had made the discovery of a lifetime.
The contents of Maier’s collection included more than 100,000 negatives that charted her hitherto-private career as a superb street photographer who focused mainly on vignettes of New York and Chicago.
50'Lux 
Nanny street … Salute
Amazing!
Lovely post! Her work is so amazing, and it’s so good to spread it around. Cheers
I love her. thank you for visiting!
Well, I’ll learn not to reply on my iPhone. Thank you and yes she’s amazing. Truly.
Gutsy lady. Love her story and her work. Saw a documentary that shed some light on who she was and etc etc. Amazing story of an amazing photographer.
As amazing as anyone who’s ever picked up a camera.
She is such an inspiration – I’ve always admired her work! Thanks for sharing this, Donald. The more people know about these great photographers, the better the art will be!
Thank you, Mike. Beyond my love for this great photographer’s life’s work, I’m very happy to now be sharing selected things that I’ve found around the internet. There’s a lot of stuff and I’ve almost been close to turning this site into more of a content aggregator for the kind of articles about photography I would like to feature. Maybe that’s still to come. Anyway. Glad you like!
Love these. Except the misspelling of kidnapper. But other than that.
lol. I didn’t notice. glad it happened before I was even born.