look | vivian maier

to look at her photos, you'd think vivian maier had the world on strings and could conduct all of its hazardous swinging, hollering parts into calm and silent little squares. you'd at least think she had some training. neither is true. vivian maier was a half-french nanny living in chicago, who tooled around the city between shifts, directing her rolleiflex at casually complex arrangements of hats, limbs and lines for a hobby. she shot constantly but never showed. not to anybody. she died, of course, and 100,000 unseen negatives went to auction, packed in crates. in fact they went shortly before she did when she stopped paying rent on her storage locker. her secret life's work was bought by a 26 year old real estate agent looking for old stock images of his beat. he paid $400. since the first set of negatives hit the scanner, vivian maier's photos (and their great american backstory) have been infecting everyone who gets their hands on them. our real estate agent, for example, is now a photographer with a powerhouse book deal and he's already collected $15,000 of funding for his vivian maier documentary. an award-winning danish film-maker signed on to the project without hesitation. galleries from northbrook to norway are scrambling to assemble exhibitions. the internet is all abuzz, as usual. and then there's you and me, who are new, but have already started to look at things differently. see more.