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Vivian Maier was born in New York in 1926. Her father was of Austro-Hungarian origin and her mother was French, leading her to visit France several times during her youth. She began working as a children s governess in 1951, first in New York, then until the 1990s in Chicago, where she died in the spring of 2009. Her entire life had gone unnoticed, until the 2007 discovery of her photographic corpus: an imposing, dense, luminous and brilliant body of work made up of more than 120,000 photographic images, Super 8 and 16mm films, various recordings, miscellaneous photographs and roll upon roll of undeveloped film a treasure chest of fascinating finds. Today, this forgotten work elevates her to the ranks of the greatest iconic street photographers, alongside Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Helen Levitt and Garry Winogrand.

Recurrent themes are found throughout Vivian Maier's work that establish, right from her very first images, a vocabulary, a syntax, a language that she chose to tell the story of her time. Scenes from the street, her preferred setting, and the working- class neighbourhoods where she encountered life, represent the principal theme of her work. Through her many portraits of strangers with whom she identified, Maier captured a gesture, an expression, a situation or the grace found in small, accessible things. There is also the world of children, her own world, a place of freedom where time ceases to exist. First in black and white, then from the Sixties with the musicality of colour, she brought variation to her photographic practice. She also dabbled in film, with her Super 8 or 16mm camera, as if in an attempt to freeze time and set it to the rhythm of her gaze. Central to her work is a constantly recurring theme: her search for her own identity through her many self-portraits. These came in multiple variations and types, becoming a language within language.

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