Page 103 - B-ALL#38 ENGLISH

Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926 to an American father of Austro-Hungarian origins and a French mother, who led her to make several stays in France from six to twelve years.
She discovers the photo by a friend of her mother with whom they live after the divorce of her parents. Jeanne Bertrand resides in the Bronx and will introduce Vivian to photography that she herself practices with success and notoriety.
Vivian Maier will become nanny of children and will exercise this humble career from 1951 to her death in Chicago in the spring of 2009. She will remain for seventeen years the second mother of the Gensburg brothers, John, Lane and Matthew, who will never forget their « Mary Poppins ”and will care for her at the end of her life with love and gratitude.
Her talent remained in the shadows until the discovery in 2007 of her immense collection of photography. John Maloof, after having bought all the boxes of the old lady who had not been able to pay the amount of her storage, will take an interest in the archives of Vivan Maier and have them published having realized the beauty of her clichés.
This dense work of more than 120,000 images of super 8 and 16mm film and undeveloped film reveals the passion that Vivian Maier lives on a daily basis. From then on, she was recognized as one of the emblematic photographers of Street Photography and inscribed her name in gold letters alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt or Garry Winogrand.