Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker.
This authoritative and engrossing biography shows that the real story of Vivian Maier, a true visionary artist, is even more compelling than the myth..
As well, Bannos uncovers new information about Maier\'s immediate family, including her difficult brother, Karl--relatives that once had been thought not to exist.
She places Maier\'s fierce passion for privacy alongside the recent spread of her work around the world, and she explains Maier\'s careful adjustments of photographic technique, while explaining how the photographs have been misconstrued or misidentified.
Bannos shows that Maier was extremely conscientious about how her work was developed, printed, and cropped, even though she also made a clear choice never to display it.
In Vivian Maier: A Photographer\'s Life and Afterlife , Bannos contrasts Maier\'s life with the mythology that strangers--mostly the men who have profited from her work--have created around her absence.
Most important, Bannos argues, Maier was not a nanny who moonlighted as a photographer; she was a photographer who supported herself as a nanny.
But, as Pamela Bannos reveals in this meticulous and passionate biography, this story of the nanny savant has blinded us to Maier\'s true achievements, as well as her intentions.
Soon the whole world knew about her preternatural work, shooting her to stardom almost overnight.
Not long after, the news broke that Maier had recently died and had no surviving relatives.
They revealed her to be an inadvertent master of twentieth-century American street photography.
Who was Vivian Maier? Many people know her as the reclusive Chicago nanny who wandered the city for decades, constantly snapping photographs, which were unseen until they were discovered in a seemingly abandoned storage locker
