Photography: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer The detail of Vivian Maier's life is still being uncovered, but it is known that she lived in France and New York and spent 40 years as a nanny in Chicago. An apparently solitary observer of city life, she took around 100,000 photographs - a vast body of vivid, sometimes humorous, often raw, always arresting work that she never showed to anyone. They were only rescued from oblivion after John Malouf, a local historian and now editor of this posthumous monograph, bought a box of her negatives at an auction of unclaimed storage-locker contents.