Vivian Maier

Vivian Maier was born in New York to a French mother and an Austrian father who soon disappeared from her life. She spent parts of her childhood in a village in the French Alps, and returned to the United States as a young woman with a camera and very little else.

From the early 1950s until the 2000s she worked as a live-in nanny, mostly for families on Chicago's North Shore. The children she looked after remembered a tall, private woman in a man's coat who took them on long walks into parts of the city their parents would not have approved of, always with a Rolleiflex hung at her chest. She photographed constantly: workers, drunks, society ladies, children, her own reflection in shop windows. She had no darkroom of her own for much of her life and never printed most of what she shot. Thousands of rolls were left undeveloped.

She kept her negatives in boxes that filled storage lockers. In 2007, with the rent unpaid, the contents were auctioned off. A young man named John Maloof bought a box of negatives for a few hundred dollars while researching a local history book, and began to realise what he had.

Maier fell on ice in 2008 and died in April 2009, poor and largely alone, months before her pictures began to appear online. Exhibitions, books and an Oscar-nominated documentary followed. She is now considered one of the finest street photographers of the century.