When Maier was 4, she and her mother moved to the Bronx with Bertrand. In the 1930 Census, the head of the household was listed as Jeanne Bertrand, a successful photographer who knew Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Her father seems to have left the family temporarily for unknown reasons by 1930. and France, living with her mother in the alpine village of Saint-Bonnet-en-Champsaur near her mother's relatives. Several times during her childhood she moved between the U.S. She was born in New York City in 1926, the daughter of a French mother, Maria Jaussaud Justin, and an Austrian father, Charles Maier (also known as Wilhelm).

Many details of Maier's life remain unknown. Her life and work have been the subject of books and documentary films, including the film Finding Vivian Maier (2013), which premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival, and was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature at the 87th Academy Awards. Maier's work subsequently attracted critical acclaim, and since then, Maier's photographs have been exhibited around the world. In October 2009, Maloof linked his blog to a selection of Maier's photographs on the image-sharing website Flickr, and the results went viral, with thousands of people expressing interest. Maier's photographs were first published on the Internet in July 2008, by Slattery, but the work received little response. A Chicago collector, John Maloof, acquired some of Maier's photos in 2007, while two other Chicago-based collectors, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow, also found some of Maier's prints and negatives in her boxes and suitcases around the same time. ĭuring her lifetime, Maier's photographs were unknown and unpublished many of her negatives were never developed. She took more than 150,000 photographs during her lifetime, primarily of the people and architecture of Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles, although she also traveled and photographed worldwide. Vivian Dorothy Maier (Febru– April 21, 2009) was an American street photographer whose work was discovered and recognized after her death.

Vivian maier