Now, in this definitive biography, Ann Marks uses her complete access to Vivian’s personal records and archive of 140,000 photographs to reveal the full story of her extraordinary life.īased on meticulous investigative research, Vivian Maier Developed reveals the story of a woman who fled from a family with a hidden history of illegitimacy, bigamy, parental rejection, substance abuse, violence, and mental illness to live life on her own terms. No one could relay where she was born or raised, if she had parents or siblings, if she enjoyed personal relationships, why she took photographs and why she didn’t share them with others. Before posthumously skyrocketing to global fame, she had so deeply buried her past that even the families she lived with knew little about her. Vivian Maier, the photographer nanny whose work was famously discovered in a Chicago storage locker, captured the imagination of the world with her masterful images and mysterious life. f22 foto space is honoured to be able to bring her incredible self portraits to Hong Kong for the first time as part of French May Arts Festival 2022.The definitive biography that unlocks the remarkable story of Vivian Maier, the nanny who lived secretly as a world-class photographer, featuring nearly 400 of her images, many never seen before, placed for the first time in the context of her life.

Maier’s work was shown around the world and it was a blockbuster while it was shown in Paris. Maier’s striking self portraits series offers a glimpse of the way she established her relations with the outside world, while shedding light onto the neglected beauty in everyday life through her perspective as a distant observer and “a kind of spy”, referred by herself, encouraging viewers to trace her footsteps in uncovering the real Vivian Maier.

While she worked as a full-time nanny for over 40 years in the United States where she continued to pursue her lifelong passion in photography, she owes it to her maternal French family which influenced her in almost every way, and particularly her approach, subject and style in photography, seeing and showing the world with a sophisticated, European flair.īridging the dimensions of the reality, personal struggle and artistic pursuit through her lens, Maier embraced the contradictory impulses of being uncompromising yet playful curious yet secretive as she voiced out her dire needs for security, intimacy and warmth with photography, displaying humour, affection, social advocacy, humanity, and at the same time solitude, frustration and decadence looming in the shadow. Born in New York in 1926, Maier spent most of her youth in France where she began taking her first photographs with a Kodak Brownie.

Vivian maier portraits