Vivian Maier (1926-2009) was a professional nanny who worked for more than 40 years for families on Chicago’s North Shore. In her spare time she would wander the streets of Chicago and New York, photographing fragments of everyday urban life, with spontaneity, empathy and insight. Although unknown in her lifetime, her photographic corpus was discovered in 2007 by historian John Maloof, consisting of more than 100,000 negatives.
''Maier was an early poet of colour photography. You can see in her photographs that she was a quick study of human behaviour, of the unfolding moment, the flash of a gesture, or the mood of a facial expression – brief events that turned the quotidian life of the street into a revelation for her.'' (Joel Meyerowitz)