Vivian Maier: the traumatic biography of the world's most secret photographer

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Fifteen years ago, in 2007, the contents of a storage room in Chicago where

, went up for auction .

One of the collectors who acquired part of that lot, for less than 400 euros, was John Maloof, a young man who had been forced to leave his art studies due to financial problems and who immediately appreciated the enormous artistic value of that archive.

In those photos (some 143,000 in total) there was

and a lot of humanity, there was denunciation of inequalities, injustices and the racial division in the United States, there were people on the street,

, there were rich and poor , there were images of the economic boom, there were magnificent views of New York and Chicago, there were several celebrities, there were children... And there were also several self-portraits of a mysterious tall woman, dressed in a tailored suit and hat,

.

But everything was unknown about that woman, nothing was known about the author of that impressive repertoire of images.

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The photos were so powerful that they soon became popular,

.

Only in 2009, when a woman named Vivian Maier died at the age of 89, did one of the families she had worked for as a nanny discover her identity.

But numerous enigmas continued to surround her.

Why hadn't someone with her immense talent devoted herself exclusively to photography and yet worked as a nanny?

Why had she left almost all of her reels locked away in storage,

?

Who really was Vivian Maier?

Ann Marks, a retired director of several major companies and a passion for genealogy and mysteries, decided to investigate.

And she, with enormous perseverance, managed to access

that allow her to reconstruct the terrible family ties and the solitary life of that extraordinary woman who was Vivian Maier.

The result is

, an impressive biography of more than 400 pages of the photographer nanny published by Paidós, which includes more than 400 photos (many of them unpublished) and in which, finally, her life and work are revealed. merge into a single story.

"Mystery solved", in the words of Marks herself.

The portrait of Vivian Maier that emerges from the pages of the book is that of

, a survivor who, although she grew up in a dysfunctional family marked by violence, managed to escape from it and find her own way.

A born artist who, over her years, perfected her technique and if she always kept her photographs hidden, it was largely

her.

Maier's fate was marked by his grandfather, the Frenchman Nicolas Baille, who impregnated his grandmother, Eugénie Jaussaud, when she was 16 years old.

He flatly refused to marry her.

From that relationship, Marie, Vivian's mother, was born, who throughout her life

, a terrible scourge in those times.

When her daughter was four years old, Eugénie Jaussaud escaped the scandal of being a single mother and headed for the United States, where she worked as a cook for several wealthy families on the East Coast.

Marie herself stayed in France until 1914 when she, aged 17, joined her mother in New York.

.

A few years later, in 1919, Marie married Charles Maier in New York.

And although the marriage was

from the beginning, her first child, Carl, was born within a year, and in 1926, Vivian.

Vivian's father was an alcoholic, a gambler, and violent.

Her mother, a deeply narcissistic woman unable to care for her children

or hold down a job.

The couple separated definitively in 1927. Carl then entered an orphanage, later ended up in a reformatory and later in jail;

he had problems with alcohol and other drugs and was diagnosed with schizophrenia.

Vivian stayed with her mother, who often left her alone or in shelters, and from 1939 she began to show signs of serious mental problems.

as an inheritance

, Vivian moved briefly to that country to manage the sale of those lands.

There she began her passion for photography, armed with

.

Upon her return to New York, she began working as a babysitter, a profession that she would practice throughout her life, never stopping taking photos.

Interviews with 30 people who knew her conducted by Ann Marks show that Vivian Maier was an extremely private and private woman, rarely showing her photographs to others and

.

The biographer considers that this is due to the terrible traumas that she suffered in her childhood, to which is added the suspicion that she may have suffered sexual abuse.

That would explain her fear of men, whom she considered a potential threat.

All this string of traumas, to which is added the family history of mental illnesses, caused the photographer nanny to develop a

.

She obsessively bought and stored large amounts of books, magazines, brochures and especially newspapers.

Probably, Marks speculates, this hoarding behavior

, these possessions of hers gave him comfort.

But, as the years went by, her hoarding paranoia increased and caused her to be fired from many jobs.

She was a convinced defender of equality between the sexes, actively supported the civil rights movement and condemned segregationism.

She remained vital and active until the end of her days, taking photos almost daily, and

.

She passed away in 2009 at the age of 83, never suspecting the fame she would posthumously achieve.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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