VVivian Maier: Untold Stories About The Nanny Photographer
Ann Marks Simon & Schuster £28Available starting February 3
Rating: 
An auction house in Chicago sold a variety of unpaid debts-recovered items in 2007.
Among them were boxes of photographic prints, negatives and rolls of film that had been kept in storage lockers – more than 140,000 different pictures, all taken by one person, most of them undeveloped.
John Maloof (26 years old) bought most of these boxes. He was looking for illustrations and working on an article about Chicago’s past.
Although the photographs had been taken over a lifetime, they were never seen by any human being. Vivian Maier (above), was the mysterious photographer.
Maloof realized that something was special when he began to search his unpromising stash. These were no ordinary snapshots but the work of a keen eye – sharp, witty, quirky, curious and with a perfect sense of composition.
These photographs were spanning a lifetime and had not been seen by anyone. Even the photographer couldn’t see the negatives because they were still on undeveloped rolls.
This mystery photographer was who? What sort of person would spend a lifetime taking photographs – seven or eight a day for 50 years – but leave all but a handful unseen?
Some pictures looked like self-portraits taken in mirrors and shop windows. Some were shadowed silhouettes.
It was far more than the normal image of the photographer being a fashionable bohemian. This woman was tall, simple, and forbidding looking. She also liked starchy, vintage clothes.
It’s strange that so many of the photographs taken by this standoffish woman celebrate other people’s moments of affection and joy
While Vivian Maier appeared on some of these processing envelopes in the mail, searches on the internet for her name did not turn up any. In 2009 Vivian Maier’s death announcement was published in Chicago newspapers.
As it turned out, the victim had worked as a babysitter. The modest, but not too serious announcement that she had died at the age83 by her former employees was paid by her three charges.
Maloof became more curious and began to dig deeper. Maier was, in fact, a nanny throughout her entire life.
Her employers were unaware of most details about her. Her family, friends and places she worked previously were not mentioned by her. Many of her friends didn’t know she owned a camera.
They knew nothing except that she kept her room locked whenever she went to bed and set up an alarm system for anyone who came in.
Some people complained she was a bit snappy around children. Some others observed she disliked touching, especially men.
One of the victims recalled hitting a man to stop her from falling; in fact she hit him so hard that it resulted in a concussion.
She was later remembered by her employers as a compulsive hoarder. Her bedroom floor buckled under the weight of all the junk mail, newspapers and books she received.
Some people saw her hoarding and considered it a danger to the fire, so they asked her to move.
She had eight tonnes of various stuff by 1980, which she eventually transferred to storage.
America, land of fame, continues to be fascinated by the notion of the recluse.
It was inevitable that the media became more interested in the case of the private photographer nanny. As a result, her fame grew steadily over the years.
Finding Vivian Maier (2015), a great documentary, won an Oscar nomination in 2015.
Maier will be joining the bizarre pantheon celebrity recluses with this meticulously researched biography. Salinger and Howard Hughes, Greta Garbo, the Unabomber, and Greta Garbo.
All this wouldn’t have any meaning if Maier were just another strangeo moving around with her weird hoardings, her box camera, and family.
But it so happens that she was the real thing – a wonderful street photographer, capable of turning everyday goings-on into the stuff of magic.
Ann Marks says she is a model for renowned American photographers like Diane Arbus. But her gentle touch recalls more the great French photographers Jacques Henri Lartigue, and Henri CartierBresson.
Her instincts were strong and she was quick to respond. ‘She would see a subject, open her camera, focus it, and she’d snap. It was just, Bam!’ recalls a woman she once nannied.
‘It was fast. It took her less than one second to go from walking to focused to shooting. The subject wouldn’t even have time to react.’
Employing dogged detective work and going to what she calls ‘convoluted, sometimes preposterous lengths’, Ann Marks managed to track down hundreds of people who came into contact with Maier, including 30 who knew her as a child or young woman.
However, after 300 pages detailing her movement from home to home, family to family, it remains an obscure figure. Her mystery is still intact.
But who was she exactly? Marks is a keen genealogist and devotes rather too much space to sorting out Maier’s notably dysfunctional family history, which involves parents and grandparents and great-grandparents in various states of mutual hatred, and the full gamut of ‘illegitimacy, bigamy, parental rejection, violence, alcohol, drugs and mental illness’.
Marks described her mother as being French and illegitimate.
Vivian lived six years in France with her family as a young girl before moving to Manhattan where she remained until the age of 30. Then she moved to Chicago. As a nanny, she always preferred to be called ‘Mademoiselle’.
It’s fascinating how so many of her employers and their children have such radically different memories of their old nanny.
‘We have as many personalities as there are people who know us,’ said the philosopher William James, and no one exemplifies this more than Maier.
The boys in one Chicago family, whom she looked after for 11 years – by far the longest time she spent in any single household – all adored her. She was a French teacher, organized plays and captured thousands of images of the boys having fun.
They paid her for the death notice.
However, she kept her cards close by her heart: her biographer had not yet discovered that she spent the majority of her life in New York.
Her name is not a household member that many families associate with. Many describe her as being prickly, quick-tempered. ‘It’s not that we disliked Mademoiselle. We just didn’t like her.’
They remember the smell of her greasy hair, which she shampooed with vinegar, her stony face, her military gait, her size 12 men’s shoes and her dislike of being touched.
Brothers she looked after in the early 1950s describe her as ‘cold, unapproachable and disengaged’: when she slapped one of them across the face, their father fired her.
Fathers are rare in her photos. One girl she nannied for seven years remembers her issuing a warning that men are just after sex and are ‘out to ruin you’. She seems unlikely to have had any kind of partner.
Is she being abused? It is possible, according to her biographer.
Strange, then, that so many of the photographs taken by this standoffish woman celebrate other people’s moments of affection and joy. Marks suggests with great insight that Marks used photography to create human connections but from a safe distance.
She was able to be both part of the universe and separate from it.
Joel Meyerowitz, street photographer believes that many street photographers tend to be solitary. ‘You observe and you embrace, and you take in, but you stay back, and you try to stay invisible.’
Stranger still is her indifference to seeing her lifetime’s work. In the 90s, she developed 500 rolls but didn’t develop one. So they were put into storage.
This reminds of an ancient cave-dweller that draws on cave walls and leaves it for good, never looking back.