Losing Vivian Maier

[Mike Farley]

The Vivian Maier story has been a fascinating one and the subject of a recent cinema release, "Finding Vivian Maier". Maier worked as a nanny and over the course of her life took tens of thousands of shots on a Rolleiflex of the streets of Chicago where she spent her adult life. Most of the images were never printed and the developed films ended up in a storage facility. When Maier was unable to pay the fees, the contents were sold off and the negatives ended up in the possession of two people. Maier was brought up in France and never married, so one of the people who acquired the negatives, John Maloof, sought out someone in France he believed to be Maier's closest relative and reached an agreement for the copyright. Now a second claimant has appeared and a legal action brought, with the result that Maier's works have been withdrawn from sale until the law suit is settled, which might be several years.

It's a complicated situation. While the two people who now have the negatives paid very little for them, they recognised the potential of the shots and invested their own money in bringing Maier to public attention. John Maloof says that it is only in the last year that he has begun to profit from the discovery. Without Maloof, Maier would have remained unknown and her work valueless. By contrast, it seems that the two relatives involved never knew Maier, or even that she existed.

There is more on the story at the New York Times.

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/06/arts/ ... .html?_r=0