Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows
Out of the Shadows is Richard Cahan and Michael Williams's 2012 book on Vivian Maier. It is built around more than 300 previously unseen duotone photographs and interviews with the families who employed her and the people who knew her, and it was the first attempt to set her photography inside a documented biography rather than the mystique of its discovery.
Where the Maloof-edited volumes work from inside the found archive itself, Cahan and Williams approached Maier as a subject for reporting. The two are Chicago writers and historians who published the book through their own CityFiles Press, tracking down former employers and their children, corroborating dates and addresses, and setting her photographs of Chicago's North Shore and downtown streets against an account of the life she led while making them. The book runs to nearly 300 pages, printed at roughly square 9.5-inch format to match the printing of the negatives themselves.
Maier (1926-2009) worked as a nanny in the Chicago area for four decades while photographing constantly and privately. Her archive of over 100,000 negatives surfaced only after her death, when John Maloof bought a storage locker at auction. Hudson Street Library also holds Maloof's own Street Photographer (2011) and A Photographer Found (2014), the two books drawn directly from his side of the archive.
