Vivian Maier’s Unpublished Photos

Since Vivian Maier’s photographs were unearthed at an auction several years back, her work and her story have captivated people across the world. The idea that a lifelong nanny was secretly an astoundingly good street photographer—that the greatest collection of photos of Chicago from the 1950s through the 1970s had been sitting undiscovered in storage unit on the South Side—prompted blog post after blog post, story after story, exhibit after exhibit. Most of these offered very little in terms of biographical information about the highly private Maier, who didn’t seem to have any family or close friends.

But surely there had been someone. A secret lover? A neighbor turned confidant, who would turn up and explain what drove Maier to carry a camera around her neck every day of her life, to capture beautiful, moving, and humorous portraits and scenes and share them with no one? Co-authors Richard Cahan and Michael Williams spent the last year attempting to fill the gaps in the story of Vivian Maier. They contacted just about every home she’d worked in, interviewed the children she cared for, the neighbors who watched her with skepticism as she pointed her camera into garbage cans. They found the people who repaired her cameras and those who sold her film. And the answer, sadly, for those of us hoping to get even further into Vivian Maier’s brain, is no. There was no one. Maier’s only partner in life, her only confidant, was her camera.

The images below, along with the majority of the other images in Cahan and Williams’ book Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows have never before been seen. She kept them locked away from the families she worked for, never sharing them with anyone—even herself. The images come from 20,000 scanned negatives that don’t appear ever to have been printed during her lifetime.

Coney Island, New York, 1950s. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press.)

Wilmette Beach, 1968. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

Wilmette Beach, 1968. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

New York City 1950s. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

New York City 1950s. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

Wilmette, 1968. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

The chicken man, 1967, Maxwell Street Market and skid row on west Madison Street in Chicago. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

Maxwell Street Market and skid row on West Madison Street in Chicago, 1967. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

Woman taunts a police officer before the start of the Democratic Conventionat the International ampitheater Chicago in 1968. (Photograph by Vivian Maier/Courtesy Cityfiles Press)

(via Slate)