Vivian Maier was born in New York City and lived and worked in and around New York before leaving for the West Coast and eventually moving to Chicago in 1956. This provided her with ample opportunities to perfectly frame the “Capital of the World.” Maier’s photographic abilities were evident while she lived in New York and matured after she moved to Chicago. Maier’s earliest photographs were taken around 1950, when Maier was about 24 years old and visiting some ancestral properties in France. From that point on, Maier was almost inseparable from her camera, which she unintentionally used to document her life and capture the most moving things she saw around her.

Her work depicts extraordinary composition, a love of light and shadow, and a true understanding of the human condition. Maier enjoyed photographing architecture, plants, mothers and their children, the elderly, newspapers, trash cans, and herself in artful self-portraits. These recurring themes provided the rhythm for the more than 150,000 photographs she took throughout her life. Maier captured the ordinary in an extraordinary way.