Be Excellent To Each Other

Vivian Maier (1 February 1926 - 21 April 2009[1]) was a French-born amateur photographer who came to the US in childhood, and worked for several years as a nanny in Chicago. Her photographs remained unknown until after her death.

Maier's images depict street scenes in Chicago and New York in the 1950s and 1960s. An article in The Independent characterizes her photographs thus:

The well-to-do shoppers of Chicago stroll and gossip in all their department-store finery before Maier, but the most arresting subjects are those people on the margins of successful, rich America in the 1950s and 1960s: the kids, the black maids, the bums flaked out on shop stoops.[2]

Maier's photographic legacy — in the form of some 40,000 photographs, mostly negatives and a large portion in the form of undeveloped rolls — was discovered by John Maloof, a Chicago estate agent, who bought a large portion of them at an auction in 2007 and later acquired the rest from another buyer at the same auction while working on an unrelated history project[3]. The auction house had acquired the photographs from a storage locker that had been sold off when Maier was no longer able to pay her fees.[4] In 2009, Maloof started to post them on a blog where he has announced his intention to publish a book on Maier and her photographic work.

According to Maloof's research, Maier came to the US as a child, and worked for some time in a sweatshop in New York. She later worked as a nanny for a family in the Chicago area's North Shore. Maloof summarizes the way the children she nannied would later describe her:

She was a Socialist, a Feminist, a movie critic, and a tell-it-like-it-is type of person. She learned English by going to theaters, which she loved. She wore a men's jacket, men's shoes and a large hat most of the time. She was constantly taking pictures, which she didn't show anyone[5]

Towards the end of her life, Maier was homeless for some time, but the children she had taken care of in the early 1950s bought her an apartment and paid her bills until her death in 2009. Maloof discovered her name at an early stage but was unable to find out more about her until just after her death, when he found an obituary notice in the Chicago Tribune.[2]

Maier's photographs and the way they were discovered eventually filtered out to mainstream media and received international attention.[6]

I don't know, I'm having a hard time seeing the pictures. I load up the page, and all I'm getting are a series of white squares with black font on them stating, "You will never be this awesome a photographer." Anyone else getting that?