'Maier was a self-invented polymath of a photographer,' writes Colin Westerbeck in the book. After retiring her signature Rolleiflex, she began working with a 35-millimetre camera and produced roughly 40,000 Ektachrome colour slides. Maier’s colour work was made during her last 30 years. When she died, she left behind more than 150,000 photographic images – prints, negatives, transparencies, and rolls of undeveloped film, though few had ever heard about or seen her work. The 2013 documentary film, Finding Vivian Maier, co-directed by historian John Maloof (who discovered her work at an auction in Chicago in 2007), was nominated for an Academy Award.īorn in New York City, Vivian Maier (1926–2009) spent much of her youth in France, worked for 40 years as a nanny mostly in Chicago, and photographed consistently over five decades. Since 2010, Maier’s photographs have been exhibited in museums and galleries worldwide. 'You can see in her photographs that she was a quick study of human behavior, 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.'

'Maier was an early poet of color photography,' writes Joel Meyerowitz. It coincides with the publication of Vivian Maier: The Color Work, the first book devoted to her colour images with a foreword by renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by Colin Westerbeck, a former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. Dating from the 1950s to the 1980s, the show captures the street life of Chicago and New York, and includes a number of her enigmatic self-portraits.

Vivian maier the color work