Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

Vivian Maier: Street Photographer is the 2011 book that introduced Vivian Maier to the public. Its duotone black-and-white pictures come from a Chicago nanny's secret archive of more than 100,000 negatives. John Maloof found the archive two years after her death; no one had known of it during her lifetime.

Maloof edited the book, and Geoff Dyer wrote the foreword. Between them they gathered over 100 images shot in Chicago and New York from the 1950s through the 1960s: children, storefronts, self-portraits caught in shop windows, strangers observed at close range. The eye behind them is direct and unsentimental, someone who photographed for herself rather than for publication. It was the first monograph built from the find, assembled before the fuller scope of Maier's archive, including her color work, had been catalogued.

Maier (1926-2009) worked as a nanny in the Chicago area for four decades while photographing constantly and showing almost no one the results. Her rediscovery reshaped the history of American street photography after the fact. Hudson Street Library also holds two related titles: A Photographer Found (2014), Maloof's larger follow-up drawing on the full archive, and Out of the Shadows (2012), Richard Cahan and Michael Williams's biographical account built on interviews with people who knew her.