A Real-Estate Buyer Found 100,000 Negatives in a Storage Locker

In late 2007, John Maloof, then 26, was working on a book of historical photos of Chicago's Northwest Side. At a Portage Park storage-unit auction, he paid about $380 for a box of negatives the seller said had once belonged to a French woman who could not pay her rent. Maloof scanned a few. They were not Northwest Side material. They were street portraits — sharp, quiet, square-format — taken on a Rolleiflex held at the waist.

The woman's name turned up on a name tag in another box. Vivian Maier had died, alone and broke, in April 2009, two years before Maloof identified her. She had spent forty years working as a live-in nanny for several Chicago-area families, walking the children through the city on her days off, photographing strangers — children, drunks, businessmen, store windows reflecting her own face — with a quickness and composure that put her in conversation with Helen Levitt, Lisette Model, and Robert Frank. She kept the negatives in suitcases and never showed them. Most of the rolls she shot in the 1970s were never developed at all.

Maloof tracked down other lots from the same defaulted unit. The full archive has been reconstructed at roughly 100,000 to 150,000 negatives, several thousand prints, hours of Super 8 footage, and audio reels of street interviews. He printed a first selection, opened a 2010 gallery show in Chicago, and the world saw the work.

The estate has spent years in court — Maier left no will, her cousin in France was located after a long search, and the rights to a body of work no one had seen in life became a contested inheritance. The pictures, meanwhile, kept arriving in print.