Paradoxical.
Bold.
Yeah.
Mysterious.
Eccentric.
Private.
She was a very, very private woman.
I never had any idea she took pictures.
She would take photographs... many, many photographs.
She would never have let this happen.
Is there anything that you wish...
you would have done differently then?
Sure, I wish I would have found those negatives
instead of you.
Synced and corrected by R3V0LV3R.
It was winter 2007.
The auction house is across the street from my home.
I found this box that was loaded with negatives.
75, there we go, $80.
I was writing a history book,
and I needed a lot of historic photos.
And so I would, like, you know, take the negatives
and I'd look up into the light,
and I'd look for images of Chicago.
150, 160.
There were several boxes that went with the set.
I just went for the biggest one.
39 is your buyer.
I won it for... I think it was $380.
The auction house told me the photographer,
her name was Vivian Maier.
Google searched her. Nothing at all.
I mean, absolutely nothing.
So I just kind of gave up for a while.
I looked at some of the stuff that night, and it was cool,
but nothing worked for the book, so I just put it in the closet.
Just had to figure out,
"What am I gonna do with this stuff?"
That's what sparked me to start scanning it.
I have a reflex where we'll be driving somewhere
and I'll just, like, spot something
from down the road that I know what it is
and I know that it's valuable.
I grew up doing the flea markets with my brother.
My father did it. His father did it.
I would do storage auctions with my brother,
and he'd win some, and we'd clean them out.
We threw out tons of negatives,
'cause there's no value in negatives
to most resale people.
In these negatives that I discovered,
what I saw at first,
I didn't know if it was really good.
I knew that I thought it was good.
I contacted a couple galleries.
I didn't know where to go.
I made a photo blog, and I put about 200 images up.
I put a link on Flickr.
That post, it just went insane.
So I went on this mission
to piece together the rest of her work.
And then I found the other people
who bought boxes and I bought their boxes.
And then I had all these negatives...
like, insane amounts of negatives.
You always want to know, who is behind the work?
I just knew her name was Vivian Maier.
Was she a journalist?
Professional photographer?
Let me just Google her name again
to see if there's anything up.
And I found an obituary
that was placed just a few days before that search.
I found an address in her stuff.
And after some, like, white page searches,
I called and I said,
"I have the work, the negatives of Vivian Maier."
And he's like, "Oh, that was my nanny."
That was his nanny?
Why is a nanny...
Taking all these photos?
What they started to tell me about her was-was strange.
They said, "She was kind of a loner.
"She didn't have any family that we knew of.
"She never had any love life or children that we knew of.
But she was like our mother."
So it just caught my curiosity.
So what I said was, "Do you have any of her stuff?"
And they said, "Well, I've been keeping up the bills"
"on her storage locker.
"We want to throw all this stuff out.
She was a packrat."
I said, "No, no, no, don't throw anything."
He's like, "You don't understand.
"She was a packrat.
"We're gonna get a dumpster.
"You're welcome to come and help us.
"If you see anything that you like
that we're gonna throw out, you can have."
I just wanted to go find out who she was, just a quick thing.
I found this leather chest.
It was, like, taped shut
with just, like, box tape or something.
And so we cut it and we opened it,
and it was filled to the top with rolls of undeveloped film.
I took one canister and I shook it,
and it rattled.
So I opened it, and there was teeth inside.
She had stuff wedged and hidden in everything that she had,
almost like it's like a secret little hiding spot
for all of her little things.
A coupon, a note, a flyer, bus passes to train cards,
her hats, shoes,
her coats, her blouses.
I have uncashed income tax checks
from the government
amounting to thousands of dollars.
I have around 100,000 negatives.
I have 700 rolls of undeveloped color film,
2,000 undeveloped rolls of black-and-white film.
I realized everything needs to be organized and scanned
and archived.
But it was more than I can handle myself.
So I thought, "Let's see what the museums will do to help me."
"Maybe I could get this into MoMA.
Maybe I could get this into Tate Modern."
I sent them letters, and here is the reply.
"Dear Mr. Maloof, on behalf of the curators,
"I would like to thank you
"for thinking of the Department of Photography at MoMA.
"Unfortunately, the museum cannot accommodate
these photographs at this time."
At that point, I just figured I'm on my own.
I'm gonna try to do an exhibition.
I'm gonna do a book.
It's an insane amount of work.
I'm kind of compulsive with stuff.
I just wanted people to see this incredible work.
And I applied for a show
at the Cultural Center in Chicago.
They said this was the biggest turnout
for any artist they had ever had.
And then the story just took off.
The history of street photography
is currently being re-written.
- Vivian Maier. - Vivian Maier.
Vivian Maier?
Saved from obscurity.
In death, she is getting the fame
that she never had in life.
John Maloof is still working his way
through all Maier's negatives.
My mission is to put Vivian in the history books.
My first impression when I saw the work
was the kind of delight when a surprise comes your way
and you feel that somebody hitherto undiscovered
suddenly makes their work available
and it looks good.
It looks like there's an authentic eye
and a real savvy about human nature
and photography and the street.
And that kind of thing doesn't happen that often.
I see thousands of pictures.
Day after day, people send me their websites to look at,
and when I flick through them,
I feel most of them are undistinguished.
But Vivian's work instantly had those qualities
of human understanding and warmth and playfulness
that I thought, "This is a genuine shooter."
She had a great eye.
She-great sense of framing.
What is she looking at here?
I can't- this is the first one-
it's a muddy construction worker's butt.
Oh, my God.
She had a sense of humor
and a sense of tragedy.
Beautiful.
Her photos of children are beautiful.
Beautiful sense of light, environment...
I mean, she had it all.
Was she very prolific? Did she shoot a lot?
In total, there's about 150,000 negatives.
She shot a lot.
She never showed her work to anybody?
That's what I'm trying to figure out.
So far, no.
I think people would have loved her work.
I mean, I could even say Robert Frank
with a square format.
Lisette Model?
Helen Levitt, definitely.
Diane Arbus, some of the street portraits.
Had she made herself known,
she would have become a famous photographer.
Something was wrong. Something-
There's-there's a piece of the puzzle missing.
That's beautiful.
I really want to know,
why did Vivian make these images?
What drove her to such compulsion,
to an obsessive degree, to take so many pictures?
Why were they never shown?
I started to unbox all of her stuff.
I'm finding leads, you know, receipts that she had.
But her-her receipts are from the '70s and '80s,
and in the '70s and '80s in Chicago,
there was no area code.
And I started calling these phone numbers,
attaching every various area code...
773, 312, 708, 847, 630, 815.
Was she ever a nanny for the Usiskin family?
Yes.
Oh, my gosh!
Yeah, she lived right next door.
I know Vivian Maier because she was my childhood nanny...
for about four years, something like that.
Her job was as a housekeeper and a nanny.
Vivian was my nanny.
Vivian came into our lives
when we needed a caretaker for my mother.
I was just staring at her, and I had thought,
"Where did my sister find this lady to babysit her kids?"
She was obsessed with just saving bits of memories,
of moments in time.
The stuff that she collected
all helped me understand her a little better.
I have dozens of audio tapes that Vivian made.
I have around 150
8-millimeter and 16-millimeter movies.
I found pictures of Phil Donahue,
like, in his home, petting a dog and at dinner.
I was a single parent in Winnetka, lllinois,
with four sons.
Along comes Vivian.
I met her in a diner
to interview her for this housekeeper job.
She took my picture.
I was a guy running back and forth over my shoes.
I had to do a program every day, sometimes two.
I didn't want any trouble.
I just-you know, I just wanted clean socks.
She was with us less than a year.
I have a memory of her taking a picture inside a garbage can.
I thought, "Well, you know, they laughed at Picasso."
I didn't know.
I mean, I didn't give it much thought.
I didn't think she was crazy.
Vivian took self-portraits.
In my mind, I don't know
what image I had of this person,
but it was definitely not the image that I uncovered.
She came across as unusual.
She wore big, big coats, felt hats.
The kind of thing that might have been popular in 1925.
She was always kind of hiding her figure...
you know, wearing these heavy clothes and these boots.
They used to call her "Army Boots."
She was very tall.
Seven feet?
No!
- Seven feet. - She was tall.
Oh, she must have been about 5'9".
Six foot?
She liked wearing men's shirts.
She wore men's shirts.
I think she said the tailoring was better.
She'd have kind of a- just a straight blunt cut.
She had hair that stuck straight up.
Now, looking back,
I would say she kind of dressed
like you would expect to find women factory workers
in the Soviet Union in the '50s or something.
That's how she walked.
You have to swing your arms up like this,
and you have to do a sort of a Nazi march.
You'd see her on her little motorized bicycle.
I mean, I remember sometimes thinking
she kind of looked like the Wicked Witch of the West.
Always had her camera around her neck.
Always the camera around her neck.
She had, like, this great camera with-
I remember it was a square Rolleiflex.
You flip open the thing,
and you look through the viewfinder directly down.
I'd lusted after a twin-lens Rolly,
and here she had one.
And I looked at that camera,
and it looked like it was rather old.
You see, the Rolleiflex is a great disguise camera...
Because it wasn't up here,
where she had to alert somebody on the street
that she was photographing.
She could be sort of secretive down here.
The camera was shooting from below,
and it gave her pictures a kind of towering magnitude.
There's a picture of a guy.
He's just an ordinary street guy,
but he has a power and dignity.
And he's standing there, and he's looking at her.
If you look at his eye line,
he's looking right into her face,
and she probably looked down and focused
and then looked right up at him.
And he looked at her, and she fired the shutter.
Street photographers tend to be gregarious
in the sense that they can go out on the street
and they're comfortable being among people,
but they're also a funny mixture of solitaries
at the same time as being gregarious.
You observe and you embrace and you take in,
but you stay back and you try to stay invisible.
She didn't like to talk about herself.
Some people I meet, and they're very open.
She was not an open person; she was a closed person.
She lived on the third floor, in our attic,
and one of the first things she asked me for
was please to put in a lock
so that she could lock her area securely.
It was a real serious lock.
She was mysterious.
She said don't ever open this door to her room.
I think she made friends with me
because she sized me up and thought I was strong enough
to lift a bunch of boxes for her.
I broke the springs of my car.
I think that gives you an idea of how much weight I lifted.
She mentioned that she brought her life with her,
which meant a number of boxes.
We said, "Sure, no problem," 'cause we had a garage.
There was a porch off of the room, you know,
sort of those sleeping porches.
And it was piled high with boxes.
We put them in our garage, which, fortunately,
was a 2 1/2 car garage for two cars,
and so we had this-
It became a two-car garage.
It became-became a tight two-car garage.
Now, of course, we'll never know
how much the boxes were her photographs
and how much the boxes were-
Oh, John knows.
Well, but she had so many boxes.
I'd like to know why you would hoard
all of this great art.
Why would- why wouldn't you share it?
What's the point of taking it if no one sees it?
It's so sad, really.
It's really sad.
If you could have just shown her all the pictures
and held her down in a chair somewhere
so she couldn't-
put a tape on her mouth so she couldn't tell you no.
Obviously, the woman was so creative,
and it must have been galling to just, you know,
be a maid.
Wash the floors, making some lunch and dinner,
taking care of kids as a nanny.
Some of the early photos I have are from 1951.
One of them said on the back, "The Walkers, Southampton."
I was surprised to see the photographs
of my grandparents' house.
We always called it Tides' End.
It's amazing to see it so dilapidated.
This was flowers.
We'd have lunches out here and tea, and...
it was wonderful.
Vivian probably spent the summer.
She was probably a nanny out of New York,
tagging along with the family and the children.
In those days, your father worked in New York
and came out by train on Friday and went back on Sunday.
I don't think that's changed very much.
If you go to the beach club today
and go down on the sand,
you'll see the nannies there.
Some of these women have been lucky enough
to make their way up here to the United States.
The girl who helps me, this is her fifth or sixth year here.
What's her name?
Olivia.
Delightful, delightful person.
I love her dearly.
She speaks very little English, and I speak very little Spanish.
We get along beautifully.
STUPID WHITE MEN - MICHAEL MOORE
It's been written about that she had few friends.
And I consider myself one of those friends.
I liked her a lot.
She was a terrific person.
In 1962, I lived in Highland Park.
I had a lot of small children.
I was home a lot.
One of my children was friendly
with one of the boys she took care of.
The children, they were always at each other's houses,
and she would come by, and we had good conversations
with kids swirling around us all the time.
I had a very freewheeling, open household.
There weren't a lot of rules...
you know, "Don't get killed in the street."
She loved the children, and the children loved her.
She was wonderful to the children...
I think probably loved them
as much as she probably loved anybody.
Knock, knock!
Apple.
Apple knock, knock.
Who's there?
Apple.
Knock, knock.
Who's there?
Knock, knock.
Knock, knock who?
Oh, God.
Well, gentlemen...
I think she was quite lively
and wonderful person in her younger years.
I mean, she must have been a delight.
I can see how they worshipped her,
because she was doing the adventures
that normally a parent would probably not do.
Life was more adventurous with her around.
She was very opinionated
about how children should spend their time
and mainly how they should spend it
was out and about with her.
She would load up the stroller
with the baby and her bag and both kids,
and off they would go on outings.
And they had their routine.
There was a Marshall Field's in downtown Evanston,
and it had a candy counter on the first floor.
Well, that was always the first stop
because there were always free samples.
She would avail herself very heartily
of the free samples,
meaning, like, dump!
You know, she'd dump the whole tray of Frango mints
into her purse and walk away.
We stopped going there all of a sudden,
but I believe that she was kicked out
of Marshall Field's permanently.
A really clear memory is her setting up to take photos
of all these naked mannequins.
Some of them were headless.
Some of them were toppled over a little bit.
I mean, it'll be probably an amazing photograph,
but as a child, it was taking forever,
standing there on the corner of the street,
waiting while this weird lady takes pictures
of these naked, headless mannequins.
Then they would go out
and they would look in the alleys for junk,
because that was what she liked to do.
She would come home with pieces of metal,
old furniture, and we would look at it.
"Is this art? Is this not art?
"What is this? Oh, this could be useful.
This could come in handy sometime."
My brother, Robbie,
he was riding his bike home from school,
and he got hit by a car.
He was sort of laying in the middle of the street,
and an ambulance was coming, and he-
and he says-and I don't know if this is true,
but he always said that Vivian was taking pictures of him
laying on the ground.
It wasn't like, "Oh, Robbie, you okay?"
or anything.
It was more just, "Oh, this is a good photo op."
My mother drove up
and saw my brother lying in the street.
She said, "Oh, I thought the dogs got hit."
Vivian was just kind of above the fray,
and I remember thinking, you know,
"There's Vivian taking pictures as usual."
She was aware of what was going on
in politics and society at the time.
She would bring this cassette recorder,
and she goes to the supermarket.
And she's asking people in line...
- Hi, Carl. - Hi.
I got you with my machine.
I was wondering if you had anything to say
about all this political scene.
- Well... - About Nixon and so on.
I think that it happened the way it should
for the best of the country.
And maybe it'll be a warning
to future politicians.
That's right. That's right.
But what did you think of the impeachment?
- Well, come on. - Am I on tape?
Yes, you are. Come on.
I don't know.
Well, you should have an opinion.
Women are supposed to be opinionated, I hope.
Come on.
There's one movie that she made
that has a note in it.
And it says, "1972 Chicago murder of mother and baby."
"Market where she found ad for babysitting job,
which had led to disappearance and death."
Then you see her walking to the supermarket.
She's walking in the babysitter's footsteps.
You see her walking to the neighborhood.
I just wonder if that's where the crime happened.
She goes to the funeral home.
She's kind of...
a journalist of the era, like-
but usually you do that to show people, you know,
to show this is what happened.
She just did it.
One day in 1977, I was driving on Sheridan Road,
and someone flagged me for hitchhiking.
Plenty of people do that.
Turned out to be Vivian Maier.
When I met Vivian back in 1972,
I was in grad school at Northwestern.
And I worked in the language lab,
and it was not at all unusual
for eccentric people to be coming through the lab.
She was French.
She had lost most of her accent, I would say.
She affected what at the time struck me instantly
as a fake French accent.
Some people have said she had a fake accent,
but this is-this is not true.
My degree is in linguistics.
I have a PhD in linguistics.
And the truth is, it was a fake accent.
Oh, I happened to see the film
The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse,
and I'm probably not pronouncing
the word right, and...
There's the lilting sound of it, you know?
"I don't really know
"what you want me to do,
"but you have to do it and come over later,
and then everything will be okay."
Her voice, it seemed like it went up and down.
You know what I'm saying?
Oooooh.
Her vowels were longer in duration than French vowels.
I mean, you know, this is the- I did a-
my master's thesis was on vowel duration in French,
so I had a little bit of background in it.
I believe it's someone who had polished their English accent,
having then lost some of their French accent.
You don't want to see a copy of my dissertation, so...
Well...
No, you don't, really.
I asked her her name.
She kind of paused. I remember that.
And she said, "Call me Smith."
I mean, it was very clear
she didn't want to tell me her name.
I thought, "This is weird."
She had been a customer of ours.
She was a pain in the neck, to be truthful.
We held things for her for as long as a year.
We would say, "What's your name?"
"I'm not going to tell you."
"Well, we can't keep it without a name."
"All right, Miss V. Smith."
You know, ha ha ha, Miss V. Smith.
It was patently obvious that she was not Miss V. Smith.
And we'd say, "Okay, phone number."
"I don't have a phone."
"Well, how are we gonna get in touch with you
if we need to?"
"Well, you won't."
Why was she giving us a fake name?
We didn't think as much about it as you are.
Now, she spelled her name differently.
There's B-as in boy-Maier.
Every possible combination of ways you could spell Maier...
M-e-y-e-r, M-a-i-e-r, M-a-y-e-r.
We always called her Miss Maier.
Miss Maiers.
She said, "Call me Viv."
You would never have called this woman "Viv."
Vivian.
Nobody called her Viv?
No, Vivian.
Why wouldn't you want to tell people your real name?
I asked her what she did,
and her answer was another thing I'll never forget.
"I'm sort of a spy."
That's exactly what she said.
I can still see her and hear her saying it.
It was so odd.
I think the only person who says that
is somebody who's definitely not a spy.
Why would you say that?
Maybe she wanted to be somebody else.
A lot of us do that.
If she did not have this job as the babysitter,
her lifestyle would have been very understandable.
The real question is, why did she do this kind of work?
Her intelligence and her views on things,
there was something very precious to her
about keeping them secret.
Vivian may have looked down, so to speak, on the employers
who were hiring her for this low-paying kind of work.
She identified with the poor.
I mean, she said she doesn't go to a doctor.
She doesn't have any medical insurance.
And I said, "Are you- are you worried about that?"
And she said, "The poor are too poor to die."
She told me that when she first came to New York,
she went to work in a sewing sweatshop.
She realized one day that she wanted to do something
where she could be outside and in the world, out and about,
and see the sun, so she took up nannying.
She felt that it gave her a certain amount of freedom.
Somebody else was providing the shelter for her.
She wasn't having to work so hard
just to make ends meet.
So she had some free time for her photographic endeavors.
1959.
Vivian told her employer, "I'm going to travel the world,
and I'll be back in eight months."
She went to Bangkok, lndia, Thailand,
Egypt, Yemen,
all of South America.
She traveled by herself...
Just her and her camera.
There are thousands of photos from her world travels.
Do you think Vivian would like
the attention that she's getting?
I think she was a very- I don't know.
I don't think so.
I think she was more of a very private person.
I don't-l think she might have seen this
as kind of an intrusion, you know?
I can't help but to feel a little uncomfortable or guilty
exposing the work of a person who did not want to be exposed.
She was so secretive.
I think that she would like her artwork to be honored,
but I don't think she personally would have liked
being in the limelight.
I don't.
She would never have let this happen
had she known about it.
No, she never would have let it.
She-she- that was her babies.
She wouldn't have put her babies on display.
But I don't think she took all those photographs
for them to just dissolve into dust.
I think she took those photographs to be seen.
I find the mystery of it more interesting
than her work itself.
I'd love to know more about this person.
And I don't think you can do that through her work.
So she didn't tell you anything
about where she came from, her background?
You didn't know anything?
Nobody pried into that?
No, I-not really.
Did you know anything about Vivian...
her family, her past?
No.
It's amazing, isn't it,
that you're friendly with someone for, like, ten years
and that you don't know anything more about them than...
this much?
We always thought she was French.
Now, she's kind of, what, Austrian?
I mean, she's from Al-from Alsace-Lorraine or something?
She's from New York.
From New York?
What do you mean, from New York?
Well, she was born in New York.
She was?
She was born in New York.
- No, really? - Mm-hmm.
Oh, I thought she was born in Europe.
I thought she was French.
How did she acquire that accent?
So...
where's Vivian from?
She's from New York City, born February 1st of 1926.
Speaking from a professional standpoint,
compared to what I've done in the past,
this has ranked up real high on the list of difficulty.
The families usually have some consistency
as to where they're located.
I at least have them in public record
where I can find information about them,
not like this one.
The whole family is a mystery family.
There's a few things that we know about Vivian Maier.
One, we know that she was never married.
She was a spinster.
She had no husband. She had no children.
Her parents are both dead.
Vivian did have a brother, an older brother.
Clearly, he's probably dead.
All of them seem to be private.
All of them seem to want nothing to do
with the rest of their families.
All of them seem to be disconnected
from the remainder of their family.
She had one aunt who was to leave everything
to a friend in her will. Not to family but to a friend
and this is the reason why.
She says here-and I'm quoting directly from her will.
"I make no provision for any of my relatives
"for reasons best known to me
which I have disclosed to a few of my intimate friends."
At the time of Alma's death in 1965,
Vivian was obviously alive, her only niece.
Whatever her hang-up was, it went to the grave with her.
Vivian's father was out of the picture very early on.
So the census records show that Vivian's living with her mother.
But I did know that she lived in France for a while
and that her mother was from France.
So my guess was that there was family in France,
because the thing is, the 1949 photos
and the 1959 photos are the same village.
So I know she was returning to the same place.
So I started looking up all the stuff that she had from France.
I started looking at the photographs of France,
looking at the little towns and the church steeples
and how this church steeple looks
and how that church steeple looks
in this little village.
And I would go on the internet,
and I would look up little villages in France
and try to match the steeples.
It's like matching a fingerprint.
I knew I had at least one of the villages
that she was in found...
Saint-Julien and Saint-Bonnet
in this remote little sheepherder village
in the French Alps, population 250.
She might have been offended that you found her little town.
That was none of your business.
She might say, "God, oh, God."
Why did he do that?"
For some reason, my curiosity is overwhelming
to find out more about Vivian.
I'm uncovering an artist.
If I'm leaving this giant boulder unturned
because I don't go here, it would be a mistake.
Vivian took this.
- Are you sure? - Yeah, 100%.
I have this same print.
Vivian took this picture. This is her print.
He says, "Aren't you happy?"
Oh, her box camera.
I have-l have a similar one.
No, that's her mom's camera.
Vivian's mom?
- That's Vivian? - Yes.
Wow.
Another thing I found in Vivian's stuff was this letter.
It was written in French,
and it's talking about a photography lab in France.
You can do like this.
Oui, oui.
The letter starts out, "Dear Mr. Simon."
Ah, wow.
Previously, we thought Vivian had no intentions
of having anybody else print her work or show her work.
This letter proves that assumption wrong.
Vivian knew she was a good photographer,
and she knew that these photographs were good.
She wanted to show them to people.
She may not have had that happen while she was alive,
but we're doing it now.
I stopped scanning myself,
because I just couldn't keep up with it.
There's a lab in New York with technicians scanning her work
Monday through Friday, 9:00 to 5:00,
at a rate of about a few thousand a week.
I've been developing the black-and-white film,
so I have about a couple hundred left to develop.
It's a very complicated and tricky procedure,
because you have to get the formula correct,
and there's only one chance to get it right.
It's-it's magical.
We don't know what she would have printed,
what she would have chosen or edited.
We're seeing work now for the first time
that Vivian never saw herself.
When you contacted me, I wasn't sure
if I wanted to get involved in a project
with posthumous prints.
I just didn't think it would be the right fit for the gallery.
This is the room where we store our photographs.
I think there are about 25,000 to 30,000 photographs in here.
I mean, it's more than most museums have.
Vivian Maier, we've had more interest in this work
than perhaps any other photographer
I've ever worked with.
It's a big problem
trying to get her work into institutions.
The problem is that the art world establishment
still won't recognize Vivian's work.
Museums usually deal with the final product,
the print that was made by the artist
in the artist's life.
They don't want to interpret an artist's work
from where they left off.
That's bogus, because Garry Winogrand
had a desk full of rolls of film that he never developed.
So they're developing them.
Eugène Atget's work was printed after his death
and then ended up being acquired by MoMA.
I mean, it's frustrating, because it's being done, and...
but nobody wants to do it for Vivian's work.
She did print some of her work,
but it was largely not the best edit of her work.
She was a masterful photographer,
but printing was not her thing.
That's common, though.
I mean, Cartier-Bresson hated printing,
and Robert Frank wasn't a good printer,
but they hire printers.
They hire somebody to print for them.
Good work is good work,
and it's recognized that this is really great art.
I do think her work needs to be appreciated by-by the world.
These are the new prints?
Yeah.
Cool. Yeah, these are great.
Thank you for showing me.
They're yours.
The only way this work can move forward
is if there's money that is made.
The sale of prints will be a part of that.
Of course I wish that I could give her money,
you know.
She's gone.
I mean, there's nothing I can do.
She always had a money problem.
God knows she probably could have used the money.
It's too bad she wasn't discovered ten years earlier.
Marble.
Yeah, you two.
Here's the picture of Miss Maiers right in the corner.
And I wouldn't call her "Vivian", because,
you know, she'd have your guts for garters
if you called her that.
Not "Missus", not "Vivian."
She was Miss Maiers.
She was my governess from when I was 5 years old
up until I was about 11 years old.
I've got in my baby book the exact date.
It was, like, March of '67 until about 1974.
Inger and I were best friends,
and so I would spend a lot of time with Miss Maier.
She would take us down to the city,
and we would just walk
in the worst parts of town.
She'd walk very quickly, and so I had
my little legs had to fly to keep up with her.
She would swing her arm just like this.
And then her stride was just massive.
Inger used to just beg her to slow down,
and she would just drag her alongside.
The poor thing.
She'd take pictures of everything.
She would see a subject,
something that would interest her.
She'd open her camera.
She'd focus it.
These poor, you know, people,
and she would literally ask them to, like, pose for her.
She didn't tend to pose people.
She's like, "Stand there. Wait."
it was just the way it was.
- Impoverished people. - Take a picture.
- Or somebody crying. - It was just, "Bam!"
They would...
You know, like, "Oh, my God, what is this woman doing?"
We would joke about how we wanted to hit her
over the head with the camera
because she embarrassed us so much.
It was imposing and rude.
They felt, I'm sure, that they were being mocked in some way.
I'm surprised she didn't get shot.
My mom put her foot down
and wouldn't let Miss Maier take me into the slum areas.
She loved to read the paper.
She liked it that we took The New York Times,
and she read it every day,
and she always had an eye for the bizarre,
the grotesque, the incongruous.
She wasn't interested in sweetness and light.
She liked headlines
that revealed the folly of individuals,
stories that would enable her to basically say,
"I told you so. I told you so."
Some man murders his wife
and then gets caught in cold blood:
"I told you so."
I mean, these things that revealed the folly of humanity.
If you look at her art, she sees the bizarreness of life,
the incongruity of life,
and the unappealingness of human beings.
There were little things all the time
that she was just plain, in microscopic ways,
just chipping at me all the time.
I would go down with my allowance money
to the craft store and buy myself
a thousand little, tiny, you know, like, rainbows and...
Glass tchotchkes.
Viv would look at my trove of tchotchkes and hate it.
She would get a big mop bucket,
and she would fill it with hot, soapy water, yes,
and ammonia,
and she would have the ammonia be such a strength
that you couldn't be near the bucket.
Clearly, to need that much ammonia,
you would surely be cleaning something very, very dirty.
She would take her arm
and just swipe all the tchotchkes into the bucket,
and they're crashing and grinding together
and smashing,
and then they're all covered in ammonia.
Me, I sort of just quietly tolerated
whatever was happening to me in my life.
My brother acted out, and I don't think
that she had good ways of coping with his behavior.
She, uh, sort of ditched us.
We were all taking a walk together,
and she would duck down an alley and just disappear.
The police finally found us.
I think she wanted to scare us.
And I remember getting lectured by the police like,
"You can't leave your babysitter"
and me saying, "No, no."
My babysitter left me."
There were some accidents, which I knew weren't accidents,
that everybody knew weren't really accidents,
where all of a sudden, there's a kid screaming in the basement
with the door shut and the lights off.
Yeah, that kind of thing.
She was mean.
I don't know how else to say it.
I don't know; she had, like, a dark side.
I remember one time she said, uh,
"These men, " they'll have you sit on their laps,
and then you'll feel something poking you."
And I can't even remember the context
of when she said that, but it just was,
she had this, like, anger in her towards men,
and now I know exactly what she was talking about,
but as a kid, I really- I knew what she was saying
was dark and a little not right.
I've seen her more than once
jump back in fear, you know, from a man.
She said several times over several years,
men, all they were out to do was ruin you.
Stay away from them. Be careful of them.
You know, that all they want is sex.
She was always afraid of being touched.
I remember she was standing up on a stump,
taking a picture of some sort of incident.
The man apparently thought she was falling.
He reached up, and all she saw was a man reaching for her,
and she decked him.
She thought he was attacking her
and gave him a concussion, sent him to the hospital.
I would bet money
that she was, um, brutalized in some way,
attacked in some-l mean, or, you know, molested, whatever.
I hate to say that,
but something happened to her that was awful,
because nobody would act like the way she did.
I remember some of
the more strong emotion things, I'm afraid.
It's harder to remember some of the other, um...
I don't know if you want to go into this, but I will.
I will.
I mean, there were things that happened to me
that were not good.
Miss Maier was force-feeding me, forcing me to eat
'cause I wasn't finishing all on my plate.
My parents found out, and my dad got angry.
But if my dad found out exactly how,
it would have been worse.
She would hold me down,
she would shove the food in my throat,
and then she would choke me until I would swallow it.
And she would do that over and over again.
There was very much of a dark side to her
that I have not gone into.
She would lose it sometimes.
I think the first time she hit me
was when I was five years old
'cause I was trying to learn to tie my shoelaces,
and I wasn't doing it right,
and she got very frustrated with me,
and so she started slamming my head
into the side of this bookcase.
I mean, she wouldn't hit me in the face.
Obviously, I didn't have bruises there,
but she'd grab me by the wrists and swing me around the room
and slam me into things
when she got really upset about something.
And I was eight years old before I could break her grip.
After that, she didn't do that again.
I was strong enough.
I mean, she was a brilliant person,
and I think she really cared, and I think she tried,
and I don't know if any of the others
will ever talk about that, if it ever happened to them.
I don't know. Maybe she got it together.
I'm hoping she did.
I really hate saying these things about her,
because I've always felt guilty
about not keeping Viv for longer.
My husband and I were talking then
about having a foster child.
Viv said, "if you want to take care of somebody",
why don't you take care of me?"
And then she kind of laughed, but she meant it.
I think she really wanted to be brought in
to be a member of our family, but that...
wasn't really what I had bargained for.
So there it is.
In this little house, Miss Maiers lived upstairs.
My father did provide a room for her above his office.
I only had a chance to see it once,
back when I snuck up behind her,
'cause she kept a padlock on it.
So, yeah, this is totally different.
This was the forbidden zone.
No one was allowed to see where Miss Maiers lived.
Huh.
Miss Maier went in there,
and she left the door open enough for me to see,
and the room was literally filled, floor to ceiling,
with newspapers.
See how the floor is sloped?
I told my dad, and he said,
"Oh, that's why the floor is sagging so much."
He ended up having to put a steel I-beam post
in his office because the floor was sagging.
He didn't know why.
It was just totally full.
This floor was Viv's domain.
It occurred to me that maybe I would need to go up there
when she wasn't home,
so she grudgingly gave me a key, and so I went in.
You can tell where she had been walking,
and it was just this narrow path
that you could just barely traverse like this.
And where would the bed have been?
Right here.
Stacks of newspapers almost to the ceiling.
You may think I'm exaggerating.
No, I am not.
Just stacked, stacked, stacked, stacked, stacked,
stacked everywhere.
High-you know, high stacks of paper.
How she even could get to the paper...
I don't even know how much she even looked at the paper.
I began to see that she was stacking newspaper
elsewhere in the house, in the basement,
and in the back, we have a little back entryway,
and she would stack newspaper out there.
Now, the idea was always
that there were articles she wanted to save
for the day when she did get around
to cutting out the parts that she wanted to keep.
It concerned me, but...
I thought, "Whatever. Whatever."
Um...
I gave her a ride to her place of employment.
I looked at her desk and piles of stuff there.
She was certain that her employers
were coming into the room she had
and going through her items.
She would rig the books and so forth on her desk
so that if they were moved half an inch,
she would know that when she got back.
Or so that was Vivian's story.
And she was also certain
that people were looking through binoculars
and could see through the window of her room.
She was progressively getting more and more reclusive,
more and more of a hoarder.
Everybody was saying resoundingly, "Oh, my God."
You've got to get rid of your nanny."
I don't think that Mom and Dad really realized
the extent to which she was living with mental illness,
'cause she was.
She was. She was.
She-she, um...
Yeah, it was a little past eccentric.
My neighbor came over.
He said, "I'm painting the bathroom.
Do you have a stack of newspaper?"
I said, "Sure."
There was a huge stack right by the back door.
I gave him a big chunk like this.
I said, "Sure. Go ahead."
Well, when Viv came home, she saw
that that stack of newspaper was shorter
by three feet or two feet or whatever,
and she was angry and horrified.
"Who took my papers? Who took my papers?"
And she just went berserk.
I mean, she went crazy.
I remember an outside scene with screaming and yelling
where she's yelling at this guy, telling him to bring them back,
but some already had paint on them and were ripped.
"Now they're all covered with paint!
"Now I can't use those papers.
"They're covered with paint now.
How could you give him my papers?"
So I said-l just said, "Viv, those aren't your papers.
"Those are my papers,
and there are too many papers in this house."
I remember my parents telling me,
"Viv's not gonna be with us anymore.
She's gotten too crazy."
Like, not that she wasn't already crazy
but that the craziness has increased
to a level that we can't tolerate anymore.
I remember so clearly having to say to her, "Viv",
I think you're going to have to look for another job."
How hard it was to say that to her.
But you know what?
I don't think she was even surprised.
She looked back at me, and she said,
"Do you?" she said.
"Well, then, what I want is two months' notice
and two months' pay" or something like that.
She gave me her-sort of what she wanted
as if she had it on the tip of her tongue
and she'd figured it out.
And I didn't know whether that was because
she had been dismissed from positions often enough
that she knew what to say
or whether she had, in a way, anticipated it.
My husband and I and our children,
after she was gone, do you know we just jumped in the car
and drove up to Michigan,
which is something we never used to do,
just because it was a huge emotional thing
not to have her-
you know, see, I'm still weepy about it,
because I really cared about Viv,
and I think she cared about us,
and it was just one of those things
where she was a person who didn't fit in very well.
She just had those edges that couldn't-
and I think we- well, I flatter myself.
I think we were one of the most sympathetic, accepting,
and congenial families that she worked with.
I don't know that. I think it may be true.
And we couldn't make it work.
In 1996, we were getting my mother's house ready for sale,
and when I told Vivian, I said,
"You can stay here for a couple of months.
"I won't put it on the market yet.
"You know, we have to get things ready,
"and, you know, I'm not kicking you out.
You can stay."
Vivian was to be there, you know, and to show it,
but she was not at all helpful with the real estate people.
She just didn't want to let them in.
They were calling me saying
she won't let them show the house, you know.
"You've got to do something, Judy."
So I would call her and say, "Vivian, you know,
you have to let people see the house."
They did manage to get in, and they did manage to sell.
I think we closed the last day of the year.
The lawyer called and said, "Judy, we're just afraid
she's not gonna be out."
And I said, "She'll be out."
Don't worry. She will be out."
The last time I saw her, um, I'm still unhappy about.
It must have been, like, probably 2000.
I was in Wilmette, going to the beach with my daughter,
her children, and four other children of a friend's.
It was a hot summer day, like August,
like 100-degree day, and all of a sudden,
I see this woman walking down the street,
and immediately we're like, "There's Vivian."
I hadn't seen her in 30 years,
but we recognized each other at once.
And we both, "Oh, hi."
"How are you, Vivian?" and "How are you, Carole?"
And "it's been so long."
We're like, "Well, it was great, you know, to see you."
And we said, "We have to get going."
And she was like, "Please don't leave."
You know, she was like, "Carole"-
you know, my mother's name.
She was like, "Carole, please don't leave."
You know, when you're with a bunch of kids
and they're swirling around you
and they want to go to the beach
and it's a hot summer day, you know, you're, like, stuck.
And she kept saying, "Talk to me.
Let's talk. Let's talk."
And I kept saying, "I can't do it, Vivian.
I have to go. I have to go."
She kept saying, "But you're my friend.
You're my friend."
And, um, I dropped the ball.
That's all I can say.
I feel badly about it,
and the despair in her voice about seeing a friend,
and I feel that I let her down.
So I proceeded to go to the beach with the kids.
I said, "Follow us," but she didn't want to do that,
so that was the end of that one.
I do remember once
she wouldn't tell me where we were going.
"I don't want to tell you. It's a surprise."
She took me to the stockyards.
It didn't come into my consciousness that,
"Well, this is where they go to kill the animals."
There was a trailer full of sheep.
I do remember guys poking at them with sticks
to get them out down this long ramp.
After they were done offloading the sheep,
they started throwing out a dead sheep,
one that got trampled.
That was the first time I ever saw death.
Looking back, thinking about it, it didn't bother me.
It was just kind of odd. I couldn't understand it.
I've always been a critter person,
and these are my guys, the sheep.
The end of her life was something that I worried about
when she worked for me.
I thought, "How can this end for her?"
I don't think it had a happy ending.
I was very glad that these men that she took care of
when they were little kids
kind of came to her rescue.
They got her an apartment and paid for her rent.
Do you live in the area?
Yeah, I live in the area.
Do you remember a woman who used to sit on this bench a lot,
wearing a big floppy hat?
Um, was she the French lady?
Yeah, I remember her.
People who still, um, live around here,
yeah, we remember her.
She was here a lot, sitting on the bench,
but I don't think anybody really talked to her.
There's a lot of eccentric people around here,
and I just thought she was one of them.
You knew to just leave her alone.
Sometimes she'd be at the dumpsters.
You'd ask her, you know, "Do you need help or do you need food?"
And she would just kind of yell at you in French.
How did you know her?
Just from seeing her in the neighborhood.
And you would sit with her?
Well, I'd always sit on the bench,
and she'd sit there,
and finally it took weeks or months
before she'd even speak to me.
I would see her in the alley all the time,
going through the garbage,
so I had a bunch of old clothes and a wool hat one time
I gave her, and she took it.
She said, "Oh, that's great."
I'll wear that when I sleep."
She was very short with people,
but she was funny, though.
Nice lady.
When I was riding my bike, sometimes I'd cross her path,
and she'd yell to me, "Get a bell! Get a bell!"
And sometimes I'd be out in the alley in the winter
and she'd see me without a hat,
and she'd yell, "Get a hat! Get a hat!"
She was about that bell on the bike.
Who would have known that she was actually a great artist
and she'd come to dumpster-diving?
That's the saddest-
And, I mean, sitting on the park bench-
literally, she'd go across the street.
She'd get a can of food.
What did she have the one day?
Was, like, corned beef hash or something?
I mean, right out of the can, not even warming it up,
with a spoon...
And said it was delicious.
She was much more damaged than I thought,
and I have a lot more empathy for her.
Um...
I just think, um...
what a lonely lady, you know?
Incredibly lonely
and misunderstood.
So, yeah, I think, I mean,
now if I were to see her today after this,
I wouldn't be as hard on her, probably.
Somebody called me and said the old lady in the park,
she fell, she kind of passed out,
and the ambulance is out there.
So I went across the street, and at that point,
they were loading her onto the little cart there,
and she was telling the people, the paramedics and such,
that she did not want to go.
She wanted to go home.
And they said that she has to go with,
and she looked at me as if to say, "Can you do something?"
But there was nothing I could do about it.
You know, I asked the paramedics.
They said, "No, she has to go."
But that was it.
I mean, they put her in the ambulance and took her away.
And then after the fact, you know,
a lot of people in the neighborhood said,
"Whatever happened to the old lady?"
And nobody ever knew.
You have to try to draw from the evidence you have
some understanding of the individual.
I think her pictures show a tenderness,
instant alertness to human tragedies,
and those moments of generosity and sweetness.
I see her
as an incredibly watchful, observant, caring person.
And probably why she was a nanny
was that she had those capacities.
1962, when she took a lot of the pictures,
the kids would always play in the ravines.
It's the most beautiful spot in the world.
You know, instead of
this straight-edged suburban community,
you always went there
'cause you wanted the kids to have a little touch of nature.
You know, wild nature.
There were a patch of wild strawberries
somewhere in there.
And I think she liked it so much,
that's why they buried her there.
It's a place that they remembered she was happy.
Now, you tell me how you can live forever.
- Uh... - Come on.
She might have gotten to the end of her life and thought,
"Why didn't I try to get that work out there?"
Some people's character prevents them
from pushing that little bit you need to push
to get the work seen.
You know, she didn't defend herself as an artist.
She just did the work.
A canon is often established, and so when someone comes in,
there's always the sense that they're secondary figures,
but I don't feel her as secondary.
When I look at the pictures, I always feel something primary.
I think that the work is so good
that it's really winning over a lot of people
who were more dismissive of it previously.
Where it'll wind up, who knows?
Much of the art world establishment
still hasn't accepted Vivian Maier's work.
But people don't care.
They're not waiting for that validation from institutions.
They're claiming Vivian Maier's work for themselves.
Her work is now in galleries in New York.
It can be seen in L.A.
There's one in particular that I bought which I love.
There's an abject poverty in the frame,
but there's also a happiness in spite of it all.
Her work is being seen around the world.
London, Germany, Denmark.
They're embracing it, and they're embracing Vivian Maier.
Oui, oui, oui.
Maybe this is the best way of all for her,
to have it happen after she's died.
That would probably make Viv happiest,
'cause in her own life, the attention, I think,
she would have found overwhelming.
Viv was supposed to be downtrodden, right?
She was, like, a nanny.
That's not considered to be a pretty high-ranking position
in life.
Not married, not any social life to speak of.
She didn't have these measures of status
that people aspire to,
but she didn't have to compromise one bit.
She did what she wanted.
That's what she taught me,
is that she got the life she wanted.
She had it.
I understand a lot more about her.
But why was this person so private,
yet so prolific in an art form that she never shared?
Who knows?
She did it so it wouldn't be forgotten,
and here it's not forgotten.
As she was photographing,
she was seeing just how close you can come
into somebody's space and make a picture of them.
That tells me a lot about her.
It tells me that she could go into a space
with a total stranger
and get them to accommodate her by being themselves
and generate this kind of moment, you know,
where two presences were actually
kind of vibrating together.
And then she's gone.
Well, I suppose nothing is meant to last forever.
We have to make room for other people.
It's a wheel.
You get on, you have to go to the end,
and then somebody else takes their place.
Now I'm going to close
and quickly run next door to do my work.