Finding Vivian Maier Page #2

figure out. So far, no.

I think people would

have loved her work.

I mean, I could even say,

Robert Frank with a square format.

Lisette Model...

Helen Levitt, definitely.

Diane Arbus.

Some of the street portraits.

Had she made herself known, she would

have become a famous photographer.

Something was wrong, something...

There's... there's a piece

of the puzzle missing.

That's beautiful.

I really want to know, why did

Vivian make these images?

What drove her to such compulsion,

to an obsessive degree,

to take so many pictures?

Why were they never shown?

I started to unbox all of her stuff.

I'm finding leads.

You know, receipts

that she had. But...

Her... Her receipts are

from the '70s and '80s.

And in the '70s and '80s in Chicago,

there was no area code.

And I started calling these phone numbers,

attaching every various area code.

773, 312, 708, 847, 630, 815...

Was she ever a nanny for

a San Franciscan family?

- Yes.

- Oh, my gosh.

Yes, she lived right next door.

I know Vivian Maier because

she was my childhood nanny.

For about four years.

Something like that.

Her job was as a

housekeeper and a nanny.

Vivian was my nanny.

Vivian came into our lives when we

needed a caretaker for my mother.

I was just staring at her,

and I had thought,

"Where did my sister find this

lady to baby-sit her kids?"

She was obsessed with just

saving bits of memories,

of moments in time.

The stuff that she collected all helped

me understand her a little better.

I have dozens of audio

tapes that Vivian made.

I have around 1508mm

and 16mm movies.

I found pictures of Phil Donahue.

Like, in his home,

petting a dog and at dinner.

I was a single parent in Winnetka,

Illinois, with four sons.

Along comes Vivian.

I met her in a diner,

to interview her

for this housekeeper job.

She took my picture.

I was a guy running back

and forth over my shoes.

I had to do a programme

every day, sometimes two.

I didn't want any trouble, I just...

You know, I just wanted clean socks.

She was with us less than a year.

I have a memory of

her taking a picture

inside a garbage can.

I thought, "Well, you know...

"They laughed at Picasso. "

I didn't know. I mean,

I didn't give it much thought.

I didn't think she was crazy.

Vivian took self-portraits.

In my mind, I don't know what

image I had of this person,

but it was definitely not

the image that I uncovered.

She came across as unusual.

She wore big... big coats,

with felt hats.

The kind of thing that might

have been popular in 1925.

She was always kind

of hiding her figure.

You know, wearing these heavy clothes.

And these boots.

They used to call her Army Boots.

She was very tall.

Seven feet...

- No! Seven feet!

- She was tall.

- Oh, she must have been about five nine.

- Six foot.

- She liked wearing men's shirts...

- She wore men's shirts.

She said the tailoring was better.

She'd have kind of a...

just a straight blunt cut.

She had hair that stuck straight up!

Now, looking back, I would

say she kind of dressed

like you would expect to

find women factory workers

in the Soviet Union in

the '50s or something.

That's how she walked.

You have to swing your

arms up like this,

and you have to do a...

sort of a Nazi march.

You'd see her on her

little motorised bicycle.

I mean, I remember sometimes thinking

she kind of looked like...

the Wicked Witch of the West.

Always had her camera

around her neck.

Always the camera around her neck.

She had, like, this great camera with...

I remember, it was a square.

Rolleiflex. You flip open the thing and you

look through the viewfinder directly down.

I lusted after a twin-lens Rolly.

And here, she had one.

And I looked at that camera,

and it looked like it was rather old.

You see, the Rolleiflex is

a great disguise camera.

Because it wasn't up here, where she

had to alert somebody on the street

that she was photographing them.

She could be sort of

secretive down here.

The camera was shooting from below.

And it gave her pictures a

kind of towering magnitude.

There's a picture of a guy.

He's just an ordinary street guy.

But he has a power and dignity.

And he's... he's standing there

and he's looking at her.

If you look at his eyeline,

he's looking right into her face.

And she probably looked down and focused

and then looked right up at him.

And he looked at her and

she fired the shutter.

Street photographers

tend to be gregarious

in the sense that they can

go out on the street,

and they're comfortable

being among people,

but they're also a funny

mixture of solitaries

at the same time as being gregarious.

You observe and you

embrace and you take in,

but you stay back and

you try to stay invisible.

She didn't like to

talk about herself.

Some people I meet

and they're very open.

She was not an open person,

she was a closed person.

She lived on the third

floor in our attic,

and one of the first things she asked

me for was please to put in a lock,

so that she could lock

her area securely.

It was a real serious lock.

She was mysterious.

She said don't ever open

this door, to her room.

I think she made friends with

me because she sized me up,

and thought I was strong enough

to lift a bunch of boxes for her.

I broke the springs of my car.

I think that gives you an idea

of how much weight I lifted.

She mentioned that she

brought her life with her,

which meant a number of boxes.

We said, "Sure, no problem. "

We had a garage.

There was a porch off of the room,

you know, sort of those sleeping porches.

And it was piled high with boxes.

We put them in our garage,

which, fortunately,

was a two-and-a-half car

garage, for two cars.

- And so we had this..

- It became a two-car garage.

It became... it became a

tight two-car garage.

Of course, we'll never know how much

the boxes were her photographs,

- and how much of the boxes were...

- John knows.

Well, but she had so many boxes.

I'd like to know why you would

hoard all of this great art.

Why would...

why wouldn't you share it?

What's the point of taking

it if no one sees it?

So sad, really.

Really sad.

If you could have just

shown her all the pictures

and held her down in a chair

somewhere so she couldn't...

put tape on her mouth so

she couldn't tell you no.

Obviously, the woman was so creative,

and it must have been galling...

to just, you know, be a maid.

Wash the floors,

making some lunch and dinner,

taking care of kids as a nanny.

Some of the early photos

I have are from 1951.

One of them said on the back,

"The Walkers, Southampton. "

I was surprised to see the photographs

of my grandparents' house.

We always called it Tides' End.

It's amazing to see it,

so dilapidated.

This was flowers.

We'd have lunches out

here, and tea, and...

It was wonderful.

Vivian probably spent the summer.

She was probably a

nanny out of New York,

tagging along with a family

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