Splice Now

She lived in obscurity in Chicago, worked as a nanny, and for a time was homeless. But she took pictures. Tens of thousands of pictures — showing them to nobody. And then, in 2007, a young Chicagoan named John Maloof, looking for pictures for a book, bought her work at a storage locker auction.

At first he didn’t know what he had. He wasn’t a photographer. But he put some of the pictures on the net, and people responded. Eventually it became clear that he had acquired the work of an important artist — mature, perceptive, visually arresting, with hints of Dorothea Lange, Diane Arbus, Helen Levitt and Walker Evans.

Those pictures changed Maloof’s life. He eventually acquired roughly 100,000 images, and a great deal more that have never seen by anyone, including the photographer, since they were never developed. He’s now working full time scanning and processing them.

You can see a selection of these photographs and learn more about the story on Maloof’s blog and on this gallery from Chicago Magazine.

To find so much important work lying unseen for so long is dramatic enough, but the last act is the strangest. When Maloof first went to that auction, the photographer was still alive. But he had no idea who she was. Two years later he found a lab receipt and learned her name: Vivian Maier. He did a Google search — and discovered that she had died just days earlier, presumably unaware of what had happened to her life’s work. A fascinating, elusive character, when she wasn’t working as a nanny she was never without a camera, usually a Rolleiflex. The children she cared for likened her to Mary Poppins.

In the last year, there’s been a groundswell of interest in Maier’s photography, and Maloof is now working on a documentary and a book. You can see a trailer for the film and help fund it here. A show will open next week at the Chicago Cultural Center. A local TV station did this ten-minute profile. There are more pictures on the site of collector Jeff Goldstein. And the radio show “Which Way, LA?” covered Maier and Maloof at the end of the Dec 29 episode.

Will Maier be seen as of the great photographers of the mid-twentieth century? It’s too early to say. But whatever history decides, it’s already quite a story.

I was deeply saddened today to learn that João Silva was severely injured in late October, when he stepped on a land mine in Afghanistan. Silva is one of the world’s great war photographers. I’ve been struck by the beauty and power of his images for a long time now, and I had become accustomed to seeing a particularly arresting picture in the Times, looking at the credit and seeing that, sure enough, it was his.

He was stuck down in the same anonymous and brutal way as another great photographer, Robert Capa. Silva was luckier — he survived — and is still recovering from severe injuries at Walter Reed. But both his legs had to be amputated.

I suspect that whether you know their names or not, you know the work of both men. Capa is best known for his photographs of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and in particular, the Normandy invasion. He summed up his approach to photography this way: “If your pictures aren’t good enough, you’re not close enough.”

War photographers take great risks for their work, and they don’t get rich doing it. Silva was a contract worker for the Times. But within days of his injury, the paper hired him full time. Whatever life he faces — with a wife and two kids — he will at least have some financial security.

You can make a donation to help with his recovery or buy prints at this site. There’s a good sample of his work on the Times’ Lens blog here and here. You can learn more about the episode in this article, this appreciation by Michael Kamber, or on Nick Kristof’s blog. For more about Capa, see the International Center of Photography.