Dubbed the “secret nanny-photographer” by the media, Vivian Maier (1926-2009) always had a Rolleiflex camera around her neck, yet zealously hid the resulting photographs from others. Her work—including more than 2,000 rolls of film, 3,000 prints, and more than 100,000 negatives—remained unknown until her street and travel photography was discovered at a Chicago auction house in 2007, when the contents of one of her storage lockers was sold off to cover delinquent payments.

Her black-and-white photographs—mostly from the 1950s and 1960s—are striking images of the architecture and street life of Chicago and New York. She rarely took more than one frame of each image and concentrated on capturing children, women, the elderly, and street people. The breadth of Maier’s work also reveals a series of striking self-portraits as well as prints from her travels to Egypt, Bangkok, Italy, the American Southwest, and other locations.

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