One of the most intriguing photographers of the 20th century
took her first known pictures here.
Most she didn't even print,
but saw just once in her viewfinder as she took them.
It was 3,000 miles away in America
that Vivian Maier spent her life.
She worked as a nanny
and every day she took pictures -
150,000 of them.
She was a poet of suburbia.
A secret street photographer,
before the term was really invented.
The shadows of the America of her time
fall across Vivian Maier's photographs.
Just before she died, four years ago,
her life's work was discovered by accident
in storage lockers in Chicago.
It proved a treasure trove for the finders.
People found it hard to believe
that Mary Poppins with a camera could have taken these pictures.
It's a classic parable of the artist, unsung in life.
Van Gogh once said,
"Stars are the souls of dead poets,
"but to become a star, you have to die."
I was the manager of a movie theatre here in Chicago.
I noticed her, cos she was kind of an odd bird and er...
she came probably three or four times a month
for 13 years and she was also the type of person
I think you could potentially wonder if she was a little crazy.
I did notice her camera,
but with her vintage clothing, I just thought it was part of the costume.
The rest of my staff at the theatre thought she was mean.
They would say, "Oh, I don't want to deal with her.
"Jim, can you go talk to her?"
I never saw her come with anybody and I never saw her talk to anybody.
After the films, she would be leaving at 11 or midnight
and I would wonder where she would go.
Didn't seem homeless, but she seemed close.
She loved seeing a Buster Keaton film with children in the room.
They would be laughing and the piano would be playing
and it was just a really magical moment.
Did you know she was a nanny?
No idea.
To be honest with you, I was a little afraid to...
try to know too much about her.
Now, I sort of regret not prying a little bit
and finding out about her life,
it seems so interesting in retrospect.
And I was just a little bit afraid to get deep with this woman, you know.
This is Inger Raymond,
one of Vivian Maier's charges.
Vivian took hundreds of photographs of Inger,
almost all of which she's never seen before.
Many were taken on this beach.
If Miss Maier was out here,
she would wait until one of the kids was crawling
right between that little ice cave hole.
That was where she would take a picture.
When the printer was printing this... Mmm.
..he didn't realise someone was hiding inside of the cupboard.
Really? Oh, my God!
All of a sudden, he saw this, this eyeball.
It makes a very eerie look,
but I know what it is, it's one of those large sewer pipes.
I love that image because it is so dramatic, it's stark,
it's er...film noir, almost.
If you look at it closely,
there is a cross right on the face,
right on my face, and it's this almost caged-animal look with cross.
It's very interesting.
When she took her photos, she would be completely and utterly focused.
I mean, it was just, you know, instant, you know, absolute,
erm...concentration...
..that it would be done.
I think even if she was here,
she couldn't explain her photography to us
because she didn't like talking about her photography
and most of the people who knew her,
and there are very few people who knew her,
she never talked about her photography.
So everything that we can learn about her is going to come from pictures,
because they show us what she liked,
what she disliked, what she was drawn to.
We really are just left with the images.
Vivian Maier used to haunt this market
with a movie camera as well as her stills camera.
"Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop, die knowing something,
"you're not here long."
The flea market is a shadow of its former self,
but still the happy hunting ground of pickers, treasure hunters.
And pickers love old photos and postcards.
Oh, man, you get the trucker photos, I get the racing photos.
Vivian Maier's work was brought to light
by people just like those she used to photograph.
What do you think? I just got here this morning.
Ron Slattery was the first to buy Vivian's work at auction in 2007.
The Chicago stuff's great.
Postcards?
Yeah, these are old postcards.
Roger Gunderson was the auctioneer who sold it to him.
Oh, there you go. That's nice.
There's Lake Street with the...
That's pretty cool, isn't it?
Vivian Maier had no home of her own,
so she kept her life's work in storage lockers.
But in her old age, she was no longer able to pay the rent,
so the contents of the lockers were sold.
What would she have paid
to keep that stuff in storage over the years?
Thousands of dollars, I would imagine.
Is, isn't that sort of tragic, in a way,
that she puts all her life's work into storage
and she's paying out these huge sums of money for it
and then she loses it all? And, and it all goes away, yeah.
When her lockers were put up for sale,
half a dozen dealers turned up.
All they saw were old suitcases and boxes.
They'd open the door and you'd bid from the doorway, you'd look,
you couldn't touch, what you see is what you get.
And it was always a big gamble.
You might end up with something worth nothing
or you might end up with something worth millions,
which, as it happens... It happens.
Roger bought five lockers full of Vivian Maier's stuff.
It filled one and a half trucks,
unloaded here in this auction room.
'Had I known that this thing was going to get as big as it had,
'I would have saved every crumb of paper I had.'
And these are the trucks that you put all Vivian's stuff in?
Yes, this one right here.
'But we threw some away, personal writings and things like that,
'some of that stuff that, hindsight being 20/20, had we known, we would have kept it.'
But we, we sold it, we turned it, we made money - deal.
The Vivian Maier phenomenon had begun.
Now, New York galleries sell new prints, often made from negatives
that Vivian never even developed, for upwards of $2,000.
Vintage prints made in Vivian's lifetime go for $8,000.
It's a complete accident that the world has stumbled on her work.
It could very easily have been destroyed without anyone knowing about it.
Vivian Maier, unlike any other photographer I can think of,
made her work entirely for herself.
She had no audience, she knew no other photographers,
she didn't really print her work, except in the most rudimentary form.
She didn't exhibit her work or publish her work.
It was a project entirely self-motivated,
entirely self-fulfilling
and this creates a certain freedom, a certain independence.
It's her own personal voice.
Vivian Maier worked in a variety of genres -
she took street photography,
wandering around the streets of Chicago and New York,
indigene people on the street, because they're on the street
and just marvellously expressive moment.
She does wonderful portraits
that are of distinctive characters
that she is able to capture in a moment,
everything is moving very, very fast.
She would definitely be very close
in order to capture the way his hair is stuck to his forehead
and this anxious expression.
She's very much like a poet
who's trying to just observe very carefully,
for personal reasons - to look at the world
and locate what's important to her,
what interests her,
capture it in a photograph.
It's exceedingly personal.
There is humour in her work.
This is a picture of one of the children
that Vivian Maier took care of.
She photographed while she was working, moonlighting on the job.
Some of those remain in the...realm of snapshots.
But many of them transcend that genre
and become more observations about children, about family,
about the suburbs...
Youth confronting age.
Who's going to have the time and the space to be in somebody's backyard,
taking that kind of picture?
A nanny would, you know, who's also a great photographer.
I mean, all her self-portraits intrigue me, cos er...
..you know, they're her and she intrigues me.
She was interested in seeing
how she fit into the world.
We believe that she never fully realised her work,
so we are helping her to realise it,
by printing it in a certain way, by editing it in a certain way,
picking the pictures that have meaning to us,
erm... You know, it's, it is what it is.
It's a very unique case.
Ron Slattery owns about 2,000 of Vivian's prints and negatives,
which he is NOT selling.
Let's start with this one.
'Would you tell us what you paid for them?'
$250.
And away we go.
'For how many photographs? 'My whole collection.'
For the same sum, the auctioneer got all five lockers.
'Did you make a lot of money out of it?'
Somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000.
Do you wish on some days, when you wake up in the morning,
that you'd actually kept it all?
Well, hindsight being 20/20, sure.
That's one of my favourites.
'But when we first started selling this, nobody knew,'
even the people buying I don't think knew.
Did you see the photos before you bought them?
Nah, I just kind of looked it was like, "Oh, neato - photos," and bought them.
'At the time, I was buying so many photographs.
'That is, putting them into boxes and putting them into storage,
'much the same way Vivian did.'
That's Vivian Maier.
A very unique self-portrait.
Vivian never saw anything like the beautiful large prints
that are being made today.
When she saw prints at all, they were usually small ones like these,
supplied by the drugstore or made by her in her lodgings.
Ron's collection would be dwarfed by others.
There was a gentleman named Randy who bought some.
One man, John Maloof, left an absentee bid on a box of negatives,
just a little bit of everybody,
so that's kind of where her work kind of went "Whoop!"
When I went through some boxes in 2008,
I pulled out the slides and went, "Wow, these are cool,"
posted some on my website.
John starts making prints from Vivian's negatives
and selling them on eBay.
Alan Secular, who's an art professor in California,
contacted John and said, "This is very important."
At this point was where he went, "Ding! OK."
He started collecting as much of the work as he could.
So Vivian's pictures were starting to appear online,
but who was making the selection?
It worries some people.
I'll be the first to honour the quality of the work,
but, at the same time, I'm concerned,
because we're only seeing pictures
that the people who bought the suitcases decided to edit
and, and what kind of editors are they?
What would she have edited out of this work
and what would she have printed?
How do any of us know who the real Vivian Maier is?
So you were telling the world about Vivian -
did you ever think to seek out Vivian yourself?
John and I both googled up Vivian.
And we're searching for her, we could find no information.
The first thing that popped up was her obituary after she passed away.
John Maloof now owns the lion's share of Vivian's work.
He declined to take part in this film, because he's making his own.
The second biggest owner is now Jeff Goldstein, an artist and carpenter.
You've changed your entire life, Jeff -
you've given up your vocation
and now you're just in the Vivian Maier business. Right.
And you're not the only one in this genre, of course,
there's John Maloof. What does that make you feel?
Well, we spend half of our time trying to push our projects forward
and I think we spend the other half
trying not to look like public assholes.
We're under global scrutiny.
Her house is right around the corner up here.
And this is a pretty tough neighbourhood to be.
There was a fair amount of drug activity, a fair amount of crime takes place.
So this was her, her last residence here.
That's the door? Yeah.
Did she photograph a lot around this area?
She did, along this stretch of Howard Street -
there's a beautiful shot coming off the bridge,
looking down in fact this way, the train tracks.
She fell and hit her head actually right by those tracks.
Really?
And she was taken to a local hospital, resisted help
and they thought she would recover,
but, apparently, that was not the case.
So during that period when the storage locker sales were happening,
she was in hospital, recovering from this accident?
That's my understanding.
Yeah, I really came into this about a year later,
which, in some ways, is nice for me.
How do you mean by that?
She went into arrears, her lockers came up...
I'm thankful to be one step removed from all of that.
Jeff bought the bulk of his collection from Randy Prow,
who'd bought it at Roger's auctions.
When these transactions take place,
it's not for the faint of heart,
it's not a standard art acquisition.
People are on their guard.
How did you get hold of these pictures?
I initially went down to where Randy Prow lives, in Southern Indiana,
it's a good eight-hour drive from Chicago.
And I brought along someone with me, a retired fireman, Chicago fireman,
er...pretty burly, good-size guy
and I met up with Randy, who I had never, hadn't met before,
in an abandoned warehouse in a run-down section in this town.
Randy had somebody with HIM for backup,
so we both came into this being pretty leery of one another.
Randy's guy was much bigger than my guy.
You carried the money with you? Yeah.
It looked like I had a vest with bricks attached to it,
so like, the type they wear in the army for protection, I guess.
Later, Randy was ready to sell even more of Vivian's work.
More and more people were hearing about it,
so the last purchase price was astronomical.
It was something I couldn't handle alone,
and so John Maloof and I got together
to make the last purchase from Randy Prow.
I went down with John and his friend Tony -
I had my friend Rick, who was an off-duty Chicago cop.
Rick comes armed, and Randy brought his brother, who came armed.
There was a great deal of intensity in that room,
cos you, you just don't know what may or may not happen.
I was sweating some bullets in there.
No pun intended.
So who was this elusive woman
who took these thousands of photographs...
..often full of tenderness, like a parent's,
but always from the outside?
All these were taken in the '50s and '60s
when she was working as a nanny in the suburbs north of Chicago.
She worked in several houses,
but for by far the longest time
with a family called the Ginsbergs.
Vivian's family,
they were very much a hub of that neighbourhood
and I think she probably enjoyed it...
..enjoyed the erm...the energy that flowed from their family.
It was a prosperous community,
probably predominantly Jewish.
It was really a neighbourhood in a very old-fashioned way.
We ice-skated, we went to the beach.
She rode a bicycle -
we all rode bicycles, children,
but...but grown-ups seldom did.
And she always had her camera.
I remember Vivian taking photographs of the kids
as they were just lounging around
and being surprised that there was no eye contact,
she was just into her viewfinder.
And...it was fascinating...
to see somebody who was er...
part of the group,
but also had found a way to...to wall herself off from it.
Her favourite camera helped with this.
This is the same model as her first Rolleiflex, this opens...
'Artist and lecturer Pamela Bannos showed us how.
'She's been researching Vivian's life work and tools.'
So we look through this viewfinder.
You can see how difficult that is to see, to get accustomed to.
She looked straight down... Yeah. ..and out.
So this is a twin-lens camera,
you're actually looking through this upper lens
and the photograph is being made through the lower lens.
One thumb would turn this dial,
the other thumb would turn this dial,
we press that button and we've made the picture. Down in there to look...
'To look down in a camera
'means you're not making eye contact with people,'
and for a woman photographer,
it was a good disguise,
because, to be out on the streets,
you had to have the personality for it,
but you also needed a tool that allowed you to stay invisible.
And she looked like a schoolmarm,
she looked innocent -
it allowed her to get into the living space of lots of people.
When I look back at all the pictures,
she was clearly focusing in
on the relationship of children and their parents.
Some of it was very sweet,
but some of it was...I think maybe judgemental.
It may also have been
that she was noticing something about that community,
some kind of...edginess and picking up on it.
The camera presented this magical transition for her
that allowed her to see people and to get places
without being...caught doing it,
and people allowed it because she wasn't there.
She was just in the viewfinder.
In order to live in someone else's family and care for their kids,
you have to be both present and absent at the same time.
And she knew how to achieve that kind of balance
and she carried it out, it seems to me,
in her work on the street too - she's definitely non-threatening.
Her eye was so excellent for catching
not just the character of the people she was photographing,
but also the moment in history.
She got Chicago in the '50s and early '60s in a very precise way,
she got the things that...that made it that moment.
There was always a degree of separation
between Vivian and everyone else.
She was clearly a recluse.
The south here was er...my dad's dental office
and upstairs was a room that Dad had given to Miss Maier to stay.
She actually completely filled the room with newspapers
and pictures and stuff,
so much that my dad had to put a steel jack underneath
to hold the floor up
and he couldn't figure out why the ceiling was sagging.
She did hoard things
and she brought a lot of possessions into the house.
Her bedroom, initially, was very simple
and, in no short order,
she ended up bringing in all her possessions -
boxes, newspapers, er...lots of clothes,
lots of different items,
and it got to the point where this sparsely populated room was unbelievably crowded
and, in fact, you had to almost narrow your way in
on the occasions that she, you know, she'd let you in,
because she was very, very private.
It was really, really strange to see so many pictures of myself.
I saw a few pictures when I was very little...
..but after that, no, I mean, she, she kept them all to herself,
so no, I had no clue.
My mom was a photography editor for newspapers,
she worked with a lot of photographers,
but Miss Maier never, ever showed her any of the photos,
so it was kind of unusual that way.
I always called her Miss Maier
and that was what she wanted me to call her,
or my parents. Never Vivian,
and she would take your head off if you used anything else.
Sometimes she would hand her box camera to me
and she wanted me to take a picture of herself.
And I think you took that picture.
Let's see, half her head cut off and... Yeah, that would be me.
'She wanted that focus of that camera'
just so. And she'd be frustrated
because she didn't think I could get it to the point where she wanted it.
She told me about the importance of the contrast between dark and light.
When we'd go on our walks,
she'd take me all over the place.
After she got done the supper, she would leave,
and she would walk to this train station
headed towards Chicago area.
That's all we knew. I never heard where she went.
She never told anybody...
..and she would be very angry if we asked.
Whenever she could, Vivian would take the train
from the northern suburbs, where she worked, to downtown Chicago.
TRAIN TANNOY: Doors closing.
The pictures that we're looking at were all taken
within just a few blocks of here.
The man sitting by an old subway station
probably would have been taken right here. He was kind of panhandling.
It was such a contrast to the life that she was leading in the suburbs.
She was looking for people.
The best way to capture the energy of a city
and to understand the city is on the streets.
She wasn't on a tour bus, she wasn't from afar,
she was down at street level.
Some of them aren't quite down and out, are they?
Some of them are elderly people who are rather ornate in their own way.
It's funny because, as you look at these different pictures,
so many were taken on this corner.
The Marshall Field's clocks were kind of a meeting place -
people would say, "Meet me under the Marshall Field's clock."
"The camera is an instrument of detection.
"We photograph not only what we know, but also what we don't know."
We're going on to the South Side to meet Sara Paretsky,
a detective writer whose heroine also walked these mean streets.
The danger that this area, wandering around here - I mean,
how do you see that mystery woman side of Vivian?
My sense of her was that she didn't think about it,
that she was so focused on her quest
that she didn't think about whether she was personally at risk.
I think she had an intense interest in people who, in some ways,
were like her, and were on the margins
of the more glittery world
that she worked for but wasn't part of.
I think it can be reassuring
to know that you're not alone
in that kind of outsider world.
And also, you know, she worked hard for a living
and these are people who worked hard for a living.
I also get a sense of...
a kind of a loneliness or anomie that is, is really painful,
and I wonder if she selected those shots
out of her own sense of loneliness.
She must have felt
that there was something about her that was rootless,
that wasn't weighted down, and that
as many images as she could take somehow gave her weight.
Photography can be kind of a lonely profession,
and it's something that one actually
has a lot of alone-time with.
That's probably part of her success,
she had a lot of alone-time.
This is how she managed to do what she did.
She actually was the personification of finding art.
She walked into a picture, she saw it happening,
she took a picture and she left.
Camera shop staff like Pat were among the few
who ever got to see any of Vivian's pictures.
She mostly showed me street scenes,
sometimes some pretty bad neighbourhoods.
This woman was going on foot.
I'm also surprised that she just emerged unscathed.
She would have been prey to someone
who would have wanted the camera or something.
I've been here since I was 14
and I can remember her sort of coming in
as early as that. And...it didn't matter the weather outside,
but mainly, it was late in the afternoons.
Yeah, she wore heavy er...shit-kicker shoes,
long skirts, dark clothing, wintertime heavy coats,
lots of scarves.
She treated people as people and whether she liked people,
that was another story that day or she didn't like people that day.
And she did not like women who were trying to act like women.
If you had make-up on, I think she basically would cut you off.
Men - aggressive or too many questions.
"Goodbye - could someone else take care of me?"
I mean, she was right to the point.
Sometimes, very rarely, she would open up the roll, to decide...
She'd say, "Come here," and you know, "You can look at them with me."
But not too often, mainly it was private.
I don't honestly remember the pictures,
just that it was black and white and it was people things.
With a Rolleiflex, she had just 12 shots
and then had to reload the film -
not easy in the open air.
She shot about a roll of film a day.
She spent virtually all her earnings on film, equipment and storage.
Unlike most photographers,
Vivian tended to take just one shot and move on.
Her hit rate was phenomenal.
This is a roll of film, the order in which they were taken.
It's kids getting on a bus in the morning for school.
She drops them off,
and then she heads downtown and she starts photographing.
You really get this sense of a day in the life or of a diary here,
and you can see how she moves through the street.
If you put it all in a row
you would see one woman's life
unfolding on film in this way -
you'd have an unbroken string of images of what she saw,
of what her experiences were.
This is what her big project was, it was her life.
It was experiencing life through photography.
She'll come upon somebody
who seems to be either in crisis or contemplating something,
people who seemed to be kind of lost in, in a world of deep thought...
..and she was able to capture this image
and this is really a portrait, it's a portrait of a person,
it's not just a shot of a random person walking down the street,
she's captured a real, raw emotion here.
As interested as she was in other people,
she gave away very little about herself.
My father hired her in part because she had a European background,
which my father did as well.
Oftentimes, around the dinner table, for example,
they would speak in French.
Vivian was a rather opinionated woman.
She had political leanings
that I think were more on the left and feminist,
but I would say that, wholly apart from her political opinions
is perhaps the way that she carried them off.
She was an extremely abrasive person,
and often times it was pretty much in your face. And that was Vivian.
When people tried to elicit information about her,
she would quickly change the topic.
In terms of her upbringing and background,
there was nothing that I ever really...got to know.
She was creating a play for children in the backyard
and she would assign roles to all the children.
They said, "Well, what role are you going to play?"
And she just looked around and said, "I'll be the mystery woman."
There were times when the parents would ask her,
"So you lived in France, was that during the Occupation?"
And she'd respond, "Maybe."
So she really enjoyed having this air of mystery.
And I think the mystery is still there.
In just the area of Chicago where Vivian lived,
Pamela Bannos is doing forensic research
on what she calls Vivian Maier's fractured archive.
Split between the different owners.
These are ones that Vivian chose.
That she chose to save.
She's also digging deep into Vivian's mysterious past.
..Hold in her hand and look at...
I see Vivian Maier as a woman
who is the product of the legacy of the French women before her.
She is the daughter of a woman
who was the daughter of another woman
who were all live-in servants in New York.
She is also today somebody else entirely,
who I think has been invented by people who love a good story, maybe.
THEY CHUCKLE
Her grandmother, Eugenie Jaussaud,
had a child out of wedlock at the age of 16.
She left the Champsaur Valley, of France, sort of a shamed woman.
She arrives in New York in 1901,
leaving her baby behind,
and then essentially becomes a live-in cook
for the rest of her life.
So Vivian's grandmother Eugenie
leaves her illegitimate daughter behind in France
to become a cook - and then what happens?
In 1914, her daughter, Maria Jaussaud, arrives in Manhattan,
travelling with an American woman, as her private maid.
She's in New York, never having seen her mother.
In 1919, Vivian's mother married her father,
an Austrian-Hungarian, Charles Maier.
And on her marriage certificate,
she changes her parents' names
to make it look as though she's legitimate.
She corrects the family history,
so she sort of invents herself at this point, at least on paper.
This Vivian Maier story is filled with intrigue and secrecy
and deception and privacy,
which I think is a theme that goes throughout.
Vivian told people she was born in France,
but in fact
she was born in Manhattan in 1926.
Aged four, Vivian was living in St Mary's Street, in the Bronx,
with her mother, but without her father or her elder brother.
But, there's a woman living with them
from a neighbouring village in France -
a studio photographer, Jeanne Bertrand.
Maybe she had some influence on Vivian, the photographer to be.
Jeanne Bertrand had had an illegitimate child
whom she'd given up to adoption,
and she'd since had a mental breakdown.
We have these French women with no families,
we have babies with no fathers,
we have this connection of women who are displaced,
who then end up living with other families
or give their children to other families or give their children up.
Vivian Maier appears to have had very few personal relationships.
She certainly never got married,
we don't know of any, any other relationship.
So that would suggest this displacement
comes from the circumstances. Yes.
In 1932, Pamela finds Vivian's mother,
using the Swiss Benevolent Society, home for single women,
as her address in an advert she places in the paper
for a job as a chambermaid.
She's now calling herself Mademoiselle Jaussaud.
Within months, she gives up
and they go to France for six years.
Vivian was to live in her mother and grandmother's village in France
from the age of six to 12.
She was seen as something of an outsider.
Later, Vivian was to take thousands of photographs here.
WOMAN SPEAKS IN FRENCH
TRANSLATION: She captured my attention because she made my imagination work.
She came from America.
It's El Dorado, especially for a little girl of ten.
For me, she was an extra-terrestrial
who had arrived from the United States.
She had a turned-up nose
and a runny nose.
The flat where they stayed was not very comfortable, or very warm.
MAN SPEAKS IN FRENCH
TRANSLATION: She didn't think like us at all.
I remember one day, we noticed some chickens scratching in a farmyard.
She was disgusted, and decided never to eat eggs again.
All the boys in the village were very pleased to be in her company.
She was a bit reserved.
I'd often see her in the village square playing Marelle,
a game where you draw squares -
there's hell and heaven, paradise,
and you jump by throwing a stone.
I remember she threw it a long way.
We were all looking at her knickers.
SHE CHUCKLES
TRANSLATION: That's my mother, my mother!
In the shop,
we had a cake shop...
It's good, this photo. I'd like to have it.
Usually, she was preoccupied,
there was so much work,
but here, she looks calm.
TRANSLATION: All that is very, very long ago.
After 12 more years in New York,
a 24-year-old Vivian visited the village again.
It was soon after the Second World War.
How she learned to use a camera remains a mystery,
but she knew what she was doing.
These are her first known pictures,
previously dismissed as snapshots.
When I started looking through these pictures,
I started wondering which photographs these people were talking about,
because what I was seeing was extremely different.
This is not a child working with an innocent machine,
this is a woman who knows how to work a camera.
This is the box camera, the humble snapshot camera.
Literally, it has one, one shutter speed, and no other adjustment.
And the suggestion is that this is what she used in, in France. Right.
But she wasn't, in fact she might have been using a camera
not dissimilar to this. Correct.
This particular camera is probably from the 1940s.
You can focus it, you can adjust the shutter speeds,
you can adjust the apertures,
you could fold it down
and it collapses into itself.
This could also be considered a traveller's camera.
She was developing the skills that would become her hallmark.
Right early on,
you see her observe a character sitting on a stoop or something
in a public space, and she works around him.
She followed her inner line of curiosity,
and it's that that establishes an artistic tendency,
cos the amateur doesn't do that.
Vivian was in France to sort out the sale of a farm
that belonged to her great-aunt, who'd died during the war.
It was called Beauregard, "beautiful view".
Her grandfather lived nearby.
He was poor, teased by the village boys, almost an outcast.
It was a horrible echo of what would happen to Vivian herself
and to her mother, who would end up in a seedy hotel in New York.
Nelly lived next door.
SHE SPEAKS IN FRENCH
TRANSLATION: It's me there,
like two sisters.
Wherever I went, she'd come with me.
What everybody said was, they all thought she was a spy,
because she took photographs all over the place.
My parents and I never thought anything like that.
Look at her there, she's beautiful, it looks just like her.
She was refined, and sincere above all.
That's what I remember about her.
On Sundays, we'd all go to dances, but she didn't go to dances.
SHE CLEARS HER THROAT
And she never married, she never made a life for herself.
Yet she's a pretty woman.
This morning, you've brought me something
which has made me very happy - to see her again.
It was a joy.
Vivian roamed the area, taking views of mountains and monuments.
She was, it seems, making postcards
through the camera shop in the village,
so maybe, at this point,
she was hoping to make photography into a career.
The spy story grew -
and the idea that she had a gun to defend herself.
A woman wandering alone is the stuff from which myths are made.
In the nearby town of Gap
she photographed a Communist Party rally,
and she was always seeking out people living on the edge.
In the spring of 1951,
she heads back across the ocean to New York.
It's as though Vivian was seeing the city
in which she'd spent most of her life for the first time.
'She's 26 years old when she's doing this -
'hopeful years, when you have your life ahead of you.
'She's learned everything so fast, she's learned how to look
'and she's going to places that are new.
'We're actually walking in her footsteps.
'It feels sort of uncanny to look through the camera
'and see the same things.'
And then, I guarantee you she shoots the East River right here.
This is obviously something that we can catch better on foot
than, than in a car.
She goes to these heights
and creates these vistas.
These reminded me of the photographs
that she had shot in the Alps, in France,
when she was there in 1950.
Now, like her grandmother and mother before her,
she turned to domestic service and started to work as a nanny.
And, ever more intensely, as a photographer.
She's on the balcony of the Hotel Astor for the Macy's Day Parade.
You can see from the right
she's actually standing with a bunch of children.
These children might be her charges, mightn't they? They might be, right.
She gets access to these places
because she's working for wealthy families who get access to places.
But often, she creates her own access.
So she's standing in the shadow here, by this wall,
seeing Salvador Dali behind that post,
actually giving an autograph to a woman
at the doorway to the Museum Of Modern Art.
She actually walks down the street here following Dali,
and shoots the second photograph
and she's caught him in this moment.
She dates the photograph
to the 24th of January, 1952,
and this is the time when there's the exhibition
Five French Photographers at the Museum Of Modern Art.
So I'm assuming that she crossed that doorway
and she went into the museum and she saw this exhibition.
She was teaching herself about photography,
and it's now that Vivian made the switch to her trademark camera,
the Rolleiflex,
with its large square negative.
It's the first Rolleiflex picture I found
and it's taken on the 12th of July, 1952,
as she writes on the back of the print.
She's capturing the vivid contrast of the city.
She's found her subject matter.
In 1952, the hottest summer on record in New York,
Vivian is crossing the city with her new camera.
This is the Third Avenue train that she took up and down
and when it gets down below a certain point, it's the Bowery.
So by the time she leaves New York, the train has been dismantled.
Now, the Bowery is as gentrified as the rest of Manhattan,
but then, it was a byword for drunks and down and outs.
We're over by the Bowery bums,
where we have, like, people like this man,
who has been beat up and he's asleep or he's unconscious in his cart,
and men who are alcoholics and passed out on the sidewalk.
And this sunny summer day where she's here.
And she's actually standing over there
taking a photograph of this man, who's looking down at her
because she's got her Rolleiflex at her waist.
He's looking at us, but he's looking into the lens in this picture.
She had to be about three feet away to get a close-up.
To go up and photograph a stranger on the street,
you have to hold your ground and be fearless
and take what you want, because it's yours.
You could see that there was something that she was interested in,
that she was going to, drawn to, day after day.
She would keep on working certain themes - the underdog,
the cast-aside,
the worker.
"You are too young to fall asleep forever.
"And when you sleep, you remind me of the dead."
She has the tools, and her work is really taking off
and so is she.
She planned a whole year away, but she needed a new passport.
So these images show how she kept her own archive
by photographing her own documents.
This is the photograph of her 1959 passport application
that shows she's lied about her parents' death.
She checks that both of her parents are deceased.
She checks... She checks that both of her parents are deceased
and, in fact, also eliminates her mother's name
from the application entirely.
'In fact, both her parents lived another ten years,
'but in 1959, they're dead to her.
'She's cut loose.'
She actually lists all the places she's going.
She's going to the Philippines, Hong Kong, Indochina,
Siam, East Indies, Malaysia -
and she did this tour.
She actually did this tour? She did this tour.
And did she take many photographs? She took thousands of photographs.
So more than 50 years ago,
a single nanny sets off on a world tour.
This is before motorways, before mass air travel, before gap years.
She fits in a second visit to her village in France
to pick up a cheque from her great-aunt's property.
This time, she also takes in Versailles and the Louvre.
People make an issue of her being untaught,
but she was teaching herself.
Her visit to Paris coincides
with that of the US President,
so she shoots that too.
She's like a reporter,
but with no newspaper, no outlet.
It's really about being alive to the world,
out in the world,
and seeing yet another moment of...of consciousness
in which an awakened state is what it's all about.
That you are privileged to see that yet again,
this life is doing this for me.
You're dealing with the disappearing moment.
It's there and it's gone,
and the only way that...it's recognised as having happened
is you observing it, knowing it and photographing it.
So you are the repository and, and I, I think that...you know,
it's great if you can make prints out of it and share this,
but, at a certain point, if you've done it long enough,
you don't really, you don't really have to,
it's for you, it's just for you.
But maybe working alone with no audience
was too much of a strain in the end.
It seems the centre would not hold.
The world had opened up,
but by the late '60s, was closing in for Vivian.
The shelter she'd found
with the Ginsberg family in Chicago
came to an end.
It wasn't until all the Ginsberg boys went to college
that finally Mrs Ginsberg said,
"Vivian, maybe it's time now for you to go on."
And breaking up was very hard for them and the family.
The Ginsberg family very prominently said that she was like Mary Poppins.
Almost all the other families that I've talked to
all say that Mary Poppins is about the last adjective...phrase
that they would use in talking about Vivian.
She did have her dark side and she had her light sides.
When she taught me, that was wonderful,
that was just wonderful.
But, you know,
her emotions could get better of her sometimes, and so...
just leave her be.
Oh, you didn't want her to get angry with you, believe me.
Where there'd been pleasure, excitement,
increasingly there was disappointment and dread.
She witnessed the Chicago riots, in 1968.
Bobby Kennedy being assassinated,
the chaos that was going on in '68
and her photography, very much, you get that sense of it.
Her work after that,
she would go to the same places, she would go,
take the same kinds of walks,
but instead of noticing beautiful abstractions on the sidewalk
and beautiful light coming through trees, she'd start to see garbage.
When you see the weight of all these images, thousands of images,
just the mildewing, wet newspapers and garbage cans...
..it, there's a weight to it and there's, there's a power to it
and I don't think you can deny that it somehow is linked to who she was.
It was all bad news.
It was as if she was drowning,
as if she'd given up on people.
As the years passed, her jobs got shorter,
her hoarding and secretive behaviour more extreme.
It was a little bit of a mystery, what she did during the weekends,
where she stayed.
She would, you know, take her belongings, her possessions,
often bags...of clothes that she would, she would have,
always with her camera,
and likewise, she would return sometimes with, you know,
new bags and more clothing.
No work exists beyond the 1980s,
but she was still carrying her camera,
still putting rolls of film
in her own personal bucket at Central Cameras,
rolls she couldn't afford to collect.
That was her major difficulty
in the last 15, 20 years -
economics, not having enough economics.
She couldn't afford all of the things that she wanted.
Maybe more work will still emerge,
but maybe she would have preferred if it didn't.
I don't think she would like it at all, no.
There's too much going on,
too much delving into who she was or what she was
and why was she this and so on,
and the trickle downs and the trickle ups and, hey,
I like taking pictures - that was her release, that was her world.
I didn't go to the shows to see the interpretation of other people
of what they felt about her, cos I have my own feelings about her
and I respect the way she was.
Maybe I would have learned something,
but would it have been the truth?
It would have been someone else's interpretation of a truth.
Yet she's caught the imagination of a world
captivated with taking pictures incessantly on their phones.
Vivian has gone viral.
She now lives on the web,
but she lived in her imagination.
Her compulsion to take pictures was her life.
It's what she has left behind.
Some of the pictures of Vivian's were from when I was a kid,
cos I was probably there, and I didn't even realise.
I probably walked past her,
but I never would have known.
Can you contact them
and see what's happening with the main show in Shanghai? Yeah...
'You see, our work isn't our work until it's shared,
'somebody else has to see it.'
She did have a very private life,
so I think she would not be very happy about that,
about people knowing about her.
As her story dissipates, and our stories dissipate as they should,
and the work remains, that's, I think she would be thrilled with it.
In 200 years, if people are looking at her work,
I'd be absolutely delighted and I think she would be also.
You know, at some point, I think I'm going to give some away,
maybe one a week for a bunch of weeks and see what happens.
Give them back to the streets, so to speak.
Look at all this, this is only one third of what I have.
There's three times this,
so there's more than enough.
There's people grabbing cameras right now,
they're doing a lot of street photography because of Vivian.
I can't give away the rabbits,
that's my favourite.
It must have been around 2007 or so, I was on my way to work
and I saw her walking down the street,
and I had a moment where I thought,
"Oh, should I...come over,
"walk over and say hello?"
And I just didn't, I was running a little late and I just thought...
So I stood there and I just kind of watched her walk,
and I thought, "Wow!
"Vivian's still going strong, that is strange."
Right at the end of her life,
a neighbour caught sight of her round the rubbish bins.
I first saw her in the neighbourhood
in the alleys.
She used to be carrying shopping bags, books.
I thought she was homeless.
When I swim, I started noticing her over here.
She used to sit over here behind these trees,
kind of a...I don't know, out of the way, she didn't really want,
she didn't want to be bothered, I think she knew she was different.
She'd just be staring at the lake.
I'd swim for a half hour out there and
I'd look up and she would be gone.