All language subtitles for VIVIAN MAIER Who Took Nanny’s Pictures.eng

One of the most intriguing
photographers of the 20th century

took her first known pictures here.

Her photos weren't seen
in her lifetime.

Most she didn't even print,

but saw just once in her viewfinder
as she took them.

It was 3,000 miles away in America

that Vivian Maier spent her life.

She worked as a nanny

and every day she took pictures -

150,000 of them.

She was a poet of suburbia.

A secret street photographer,

before the term was really invented.

The shadows of the America
of her time

fall across Vivian Maier's
photographs.

Just before she died,
four years ago,

her life's work was discovered
by accident

in storage lockers in Chicago.

It proved a treasure trove
for the finders.

People found it hard to believe

that Mary Poppins with a camera
could have taken these pictures.

It's a classic parable
of the artist, unsung in life.

Van Gogh once said,

"Stars are the souls of dead poets,

"but to become a star,
you have to die."

I was the manager of a movie theatre
here in Chicago.

I noticed her, cos she was
kind of an odd bird and er...

she came probably three or four times
a month

for 13 years and she was also
the type of person

I think you could potentially wonder
if she was a little crazy.

I did notice her camera,

but with her vintage clothing, I just
thought it was part of the costume.

The rest of my staff at the theatre
thought she was mean.

They would say, "Oh, I don't want
to deal with her.

"Jim, can you go talk to her?"

I never saw her come with anybody
and I never saw her talk to anybody.

After the films, she would be leaving
at 11 or midnight

and I would wonder
where she would go.

Didn't seem homeless,
but she seemed close.

She loved seeing a Buster Keaton film
with children in the room.

They would be laughing
and the piano would be playing

and it was just a really
magical moment.

Did you know she was a nanny?

No idea.

To be honest with you,
I was a little afraid to...

try to know too much about her.

Now, I sort of regret
not prying a little bit

and finding out about her life,

it seems so interesting
in retrospect.

And I was just a little bit afraid to
get deep with this woman, you know.

This is Inger Raymond,

one of Vivian Maier's charges.

Vivian took hundreds
of photographs of Inger,

almost all of which
she's never seen before.

Many were taken on this beach.

If Miss Maier was out here,

she would wait until one of the kids
was crawling

right between that little
ice cave hole.

That was where she would take
a picture.

When the printer was printing this...
Mmm.

..he didn't realise someone was
hiding inside of the cupboard.

Really? Oh, my God!

All of a sudden, he saw this,
this eyeball.

It makes a very eerie look,

but I know what it is, it's one
of those large sewer pipes.

I love that image because
it is so dramatic, it's stark,

it's er...film noir, almost.

If you look at it closely,

there is a cross right on the face,

right on my face, and it's this
almost caged-animal look with cross.

It's very interesting.

When she took her photos, she would
be completely and utterly focused.

I mean, it was just, you know,
instant, you know, absolute,

erm...concentration...

..that it would be done.

I think even if she was here,

she couldn't explain her photography
to us

because she didn't like talking
about her photography

and most of the people who knew her,

and there are very few people
who knew her,

she never talked
about her photography.

So everything that we can learn about
her is going to come from pictures,

because they show us what she liked,

what she disliked,
what she was drawn to.

We really are just left
with the images.

Vivian Maier used to haunt
this market

with a movie camera
as well as her stills camera.

"Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop,
die knowing something,

"you're not here long."

The flea market is a shadow
of its former self,

but still the happy hunting ground
of pickers, treasure hunters.

And pickers love old photos
and postcards.

Oh, man, you get the trucker photos,
I get the racing photos.

Vivian Maier's work was brought
to light

by people just like those
she used to photograph.

What do you think?
I just got here this morning.

Ron Slattery was the first to buy
Vivian's work at auction in 2007.

The Chicago stuff's great.

Postcards?

Yeah, these are old postcards.

Roger Gunderson was the auctioneer
who sold it to him.

Oh, there you go. That's nice.

There's Lake Street with the...

That's pretty cool, isn't it?

Vivian Maier had no home of her own,

so she kept her life's work
in storage lockers.

But in her old age, she was
no longer able to pay the rent,

so the contents of the lockers
were sold.

What would she have paid

to keep that stuff in storage
over the years?

Thousands of dollars,
I would imagine.

Is, isn't that sort of tragic,
in a way,

that she puts all her
life's work into storage

and she's paying out
these huge sums of money for it

and then she loses it all?
And, and it all goes away, yeah.

When her lockers were
put up for sale,

half a dozen dealers turned up.

All they saw were old suitcases
and boxes.

They'd open the door and you'd
bid from the doorway, you'd look,

you couldn't touch,
what you see is what you get.

And it was always a big gamble.

You might end up with something
worth nothing

or you might end up with something
worth millions,

which, as it happens...
It happens.

Roger bought five lockers
full of Vivian Maier's stuff.

It filled one and a half trucks,

unloaded here in this auction room.

'Had I known that this thing was
going to get as big as it had,

'I would have saved every crumb
of paper I had.'

And these are the trucks
that you put all Vivian's stuff in?

Yes, this one right here.

'But we threw some away, personal
writings and things like that,

'some of that stuff that,
hindsight being 20/20,

had we known, we
would have kept it.'

But we, we sold it, we turned it,
we made money - deal.

The Vivian Maier phenomenon
had begun.

Now, New York galleries sell new
prints, often made from negatives

that Vivian never even developed,
for upwards of 2,000.

Vintage prints made in Vivian's
lifetime go for 8,000.

It's a complete accident that
the world has stumbled on her work.

It could very easily have been destroyed
without anyone knowing about it.

Vivian Maier, unlike any other
photographer I can think of,

made her work entirely for herself.

She had no audience,
she knew no other photographers,

she didn't really print her work,
except in the most rudimentary form.

She didn't exhibit her work
or publish her work.

It was a project entirely
self-motivated,

entirely self-fulfilling

and this creates a certain freedom,
a certain independence.

It's her own personal voice.

Vivian Maier worked in a variety
of genres -

she took street photography,

wandering around the streets
of Chicago and New York,

indigene people on the street,
because they're on the street

and just marvellously
expressive moment.

She does wonderful portraits

that are of distinctive characters

that she is able to capture
in a moment,

everything is moving very, very fast.

She would definitely be very close

in order to capture the way his hair
is stuck to his forehead

and this anxious expression.

She's very much like a poet

who's trying to just observe
very carefully,

for personal reasons -
to look at the world

and locate what's important to her,

what interests her,

capture it in a photograph.

It's exceedingly personal.

There is humour in her work.

This is a picture
of one of the children

that Vivian Maier took care of.

She photographed while she was
working, moonlighting on the job.

Some of those remain
in the...realm of snapshots.

But many of them transcend
that genre

and become more observations
about children, about family,

about the suburbs...

Youth confronting age.

Who's going to have the time and the
space to be in somebody's backyard,

taking that kind of picture?

A nanny would, you know,
who's also a great photographer.

I mean, all her self-portraits
intrigue me, cos er...

..you know, they're her
and she intrigues me.

She was interested in seeing

how she fit into the world.

We believe that she never fully
realised her work,

so we are helping her to realise it,

by printing it in a certain way,
by editing it in a certain way,

picking the pictures
that have meaning to us,

erm... You know, it's,
it is what it is.

It's a very unique case.

Ron Slattery owns about 2,000
of Vivian's prints and negatives,

which he is NOT selling.

Let's start with this one.

'Would you tell us
what you paid for them?'

250.

And away we go.

'For how many photographs?
'My whole collection.'

For the same sum,
the auctioneer got all five lockers.

'Did you make a lot of money
out of it?'

Somewhere between 15,000 and 20,000.

Do you wish on some days,
when you wake up in the morning,

that you'd actually kept it all?

Well, hindsight being 20/20, sure.

That's one of my favourites.

'But when we first started
selling this, nobody knew,'

even the people buying
I don't think knew.

Did you see the photos
before you bought them?

Nah, I just kind of looked it was like,
"Oh, neato - photos," and bought them.

'At the time, I was buying so many
photographs.

'That is, putting them into
boxes and putting them into storage,

'much the same way Vivian did.'

That's Vivian Maier.

A very unique self-portrait.

Vivian never saw anything
like the beautiful large prints

that are being made today.

When she saw prints at all, they
were usually small ones like these,

supplied by the drugstore
or made by her in her lodgings.

Ron's collection would be dwarfed
by others.

There was a gentleman named Randy
who bought some.

One man, John Maloof, left an
absentee bid on a box of negatives,

just a little bit of everybody,

so that's kind of where her work
kind of went "Whoop!"

When I went through some boxes
in 2008,

I pulled out the slides
and went, "Wow, these are cool,"

posted some on my website.

John starts making prints
from Vivian's negatives

and selling them on eBay.

Alan Secular, who's an art professor
in California,

contacted John and said,
"This is very important."

At this point was where he went,
"Ding! OK."

He started collecting
as much of the work as he could.

So Vivian's pictures were starting
to appear online,

but who was making the selection?

It worries some people.

I'll be the first to honour
the quality of the work,

but, at the same time, I'm concerned,

because we're only seeing pictures

that the people who bought
the suitcases decided to edit

and, and what kind of editors
are they?

What would she have edited
out of this work

and what would she have printed?

How do any of us know
who the real Vivian Maier is?

So you were telling the world
about Vivian -

did you ever think to seek out
Vivian yourself?

John and I both googled up Vivian.

And we're searching for her,
we could find no information.

The first thing that popped up was
her obituary after she passed away.

John Maloof now owns
the lion's share of Vivian's work.

He declined to take part in this
film, because he's making his own.

The second biggest owner is now Jeff
Goldstein, an artist and carpenter.

You've changed your entire life,
Jeff -

you've given up your vocation

and now you're just in the Vivian
Maier business. Right.

And you're not the only one
in this genre, of course,

there's John Maloof.
What does that make you feel?

Well, we spend half of our time
trying to push our projects forward

and I think we spend the other half

trying not to look like public
assholes.

We're under global scrutiny.

Her house is right around the corner
up here.

And this is a pretty tough
neighbourhood to be.

There was a fair amount
of drug activity,

a fair amount of crime takes place.

So this was her,
her last residence here.

That's the door? Yeah.

Did she photograph a lot
around this area?

She did, along this stretch
of Howard Street -

there's a beautiful shot
coming off the bridge,

looking down in fact this way,
the train tracks.

She fell and hit her head
actually right by those tracks.

Really?

And she was taken to a local
hospital, resisted help

and they thought she would recover,

but, apparently, that was not
the case.

So during that period when the
storage locker sales were happening,

she was in hospital,
recovering from this accident?

That's my understanding.

Yeah, I really came into this
about a year later,

which, in some ways, is nice for me.

How do you mean by that?

She went into arrears,
her lockers came up...

I'm thankful to be one step removed
from all of that.

Jeff bought the bulk
of his collection from Randy Prow,

who'd bought it at Roger's auctions.

When these transactions take place,

it's not for the faint of heart,

it's not a standard art acquisition.

People are on their guard.

How did you get hold of these
pictures?

I initially went down to where Randy
Prow lives, in Southern Indiana,

it's a good eight-hour drive
from Chicago.

And I brought along someone with me,
a retired fireman, Chicago fireman,

er...pretty burly, good-size guy

and I met up with Randy,
who I had never, hadn't met before,

in an abandoned warehouse
in a run-down section in this town.

Randy had somebody with HIM
for backup,

so we both came into this
being pretty leery of one another.

Randy's guy was much bigger
than my guy.

You carried the money with you?
Yeah.

It looked like I had a vest
with bricks attached to it,

so like, the type they wear
in the army for protection, I guess.

Later, Randy was ready to sell
even more of Vivian's work.

More and more people
were hearing about it,

so the last purchase price
was astronomical.

It was something
I couldn't handle alone,

and so John Maloof and I
got together

to make the last purchase
from Randy Prow.

I went down with John
and his friend Tony -

I had my friend Rick,
who was an off-duty Chicago cop.

Rick comes armed, and Randy
brought his brother, who came armed.

There was a great deal of intensity
in that room,

cos you, you just don't know
what may or may not happen.

I was sweating some bullets in there.

No pun intended.

So who was this elusive woman

who took these thousands
of photographs...

..often full of tenderness,
like a parent's,

but always from the outside?

All these were taken
in the '50s and '60s

when she was working as a nanny
in the suburbs north of Chicago.

She worked in several houses,

but for by far the longest time

with a family called the Ginsbergs.

Vivian's family,

they were very much a hub
of that neighbourhood

and I think she probably
enjoyed it...

..enjoyed the erm...the energy
that flowed from their family.

It was a prosperous community,

probably predominantly Jewish.

It was really a neighbourhood
in a very old-fashioned way.

We ice-skated, we went to the beach.

She rode a bicycle -

we all rode bicycles, children,

but...but grown-ups seldom did.

And she always had her camera.

I remember Vivian taking photographs
of the kids

as they were just lounging around

and being surprised
that there was no eye contact,

she was just into her viewfinder.

And...it was fascinating...

to see somebody who was er...

part of the group,

but also had found a way to...to
wall herself off from it.

Her favourite camera
helped with this.

This is the same model as her first
Rolleiflex, this opens...

'Artist and lecturer Pamela Bannos
showed us how.

'She's been researching Vivian's
life work and tools.'

So we look through this viewfinder.

You can see how difficult that
is to see, to get accustomed to.

She looked straight down... Yeah.
..and out.

So this is a twin-lens camera,

you're actually looking
through this upper lens

and the photograph is being made
through the lower lens.

One thumb would turn this dial,

the other thumb would turn
this dial,

we press that button and we've made
the picture. Down in there to look...

'To look down in a camera

'means you're not making eye contact
with people,'

and for a woman photographer,

it was a good disguise,

because, to be out on the streets,

you had to have
the personality for it,

but you also needed a tool
that allowed you to stay invisible.

And she looked like a schoolmarm,

she looked innocent -

it allowed her to get into
the living space of lots of people.

When I look back at
all the pictures,

she was clearly focusing in

on the relationship of children
and their parents.

Some of it was very sweet,

but some of it was...I think
maybe judgemental.

It may also have been

that she was noticing something
about that community,

some kind of...edginess
and picking up on it.

The camera presented this magical
transition for her

that allowed her to see people
and to get places

without being...caught doing it,

and people allowed it
because she wasn't there.

She was just in the viewfinder.

In order to live in someone else's
family and care for their kids,

you have to be both present
and absent at the same time.

And she knew how to achieve
that kind of balance

and she carried it out,
it seems to me,

in her work on the street too -
she's definitely non-threatening.

Her eye was so excellent
for catching

not just the character
of the people she was photographing,

but also the moment in history.

She got Chicago in the '50s and
early '60s in a very precise way,

she got the things that...that
made it that moment.

There was always a degree
of separation

between Vivian and everyone else.

She was clearly a recluse.

The south here was er...my dad's
dental office

and upstairs was a room that Dad
had given to Miss Maier to stay.

She actually completely
filled the room with newspapers

and pictures and stuff,

so much that my dad had to put
a steel jack underneath

to hold the floor up

and he couldn't figure out
why the ceiling was sagging.

She did hoard things

and she brought a lot of possessions
into the house.

Her bedroom, initially,
was very simple

and, in no short order,

she ended up bringing in
all her possessions -

boxes, newspapers, er...lots
of clothes,

lots of different items,

and it got to the point where
this sparsely populated room

was unbelievably crowded

and, in fact, you had to almost
narrow your way in

on the occasions that she,
you know, she'd let you in,

because she was very, very private.

It was really, really strange to see
so many pictures of myself.

I saw a few pictures
when I was very little...

..but after that, no, I mean,
she, she kept them all to herself,

so no, I had no clue.

My mom was a photography editor
for newspapers,

she worked with a lot
of photographers,

but Miss Maier never, ever
showed her any of the photos,

so it was kind of unusual that way.

I always called her Miss Maier

and that was what she wanted me
to call her,

or my parents. Never Vivian,

and she would take your head off
if you used anything else.

Sometimes she would hand
her box camera to me

and she wanted me to take
a picture of herself.

And I think you took that picture.

Let's see, half her head cut off
and... Yeah, that would be me.

'She wanted that focus
of that camera'

just so. And she'd be frustrated

because she didn't think I could get
it to the point where she wanted it.

She told me about the importance of
the contrast between dark and light.

When we'd go on our walks,

she'd take me all over the place.

After she got done the supper,
she would leave,

and she would walk
to this train station

headed towards Chicago area.

That's all we knew.
I never heard where she went.

She never told anybody...

..and she would be very angry
if we asked.

Whenever she could,
Vivian would take the train

from the northern suburbs, where
she worked, to downtown Chicago.

TRAIN TANNOY: Doors closing.

The pictures that we're looking
at were all taken

within just a few blocks of here.

The man sitting
by an old subway station

probably would have been taken right
here. He was kind of panhandling.

It was such a contrast to the life
that she was leading in the suburbs.

She was looking for people.

The best way to capture
the energy of a city

and to understand the city
is on the streets.

She wasn't on a tour bus,
she wasn't from afar,

she was down at street level.

Some of them aren't quite down
and out, are they?

Some of them are elderly people who
are rather ornate in their own way.

It's funny because, as you
look at these different pictures,

so many were taken on this corner.

The Marshall Field's clocks
were kind of a meeting place -

people would say, "Meet me
under the Marshall Field's clock."

"The camera is
an instrument of detection.

"We photograph not only what we know,
but also what we don't know."

We're going on to the South Side
to meet Sara Paretsky,

a detective writer whose heroine
also walked these mean streets.

The danger that this area,
wandering around here - I mean,

how do you see that mystery woman
side of Vivian?

My sense of her was
that she didn't think about it,

that she was so focused on her quest

that she didn't think about
whether she was personally at risk.

I think she had an intense
interest in people who, in some ways,

were like her, and were on the
margins

of the more glittery world

that she worked for
but wasn't part of.

I think it can be reassuring

to know that you're not alone

in that kind of outsider world.

And also, you know,
she worked hard for a living

and these are people who worked hard
for a living.

I also get a sense of...

a kind of a loneliness or anomie
that is, is really painful,

and I wonder if she selected
those shots

out of her own sense of loneliness.

She must have felt

that there was something
about her that was rootless,

that wasn't weighted down, and that

as many images as she could take
somehow gave her weight.

Photography can be kind of a lonely
profession,

and it's something that one actually

has a lot of alone-time with.

That's probably part of her success,

she had a lot of alone-time.

This is how she managed
to do what she did.

She actually was the personification
of finding art.

She walked into a picture,
she saw it happening,

she took a picture and she left.

Camera shop staff like Pat
were among the few

who ever got to see
any of Vivian's pictures.

She mostly showed me street scenes,

sometimes some pretty
bad neighbourhoods.

This woman was going on foot.

I'm also surprised that she just
emerged unscathed.

She would have been prey to someone

who would have wanted the camera
or something.

I've been here since I was 14

and I can remember her
sort of coming in

as early as that. And...it didn't
matter the weather outside,

but mainly, it was late
in the afternoons.

Yeah, she wore heavy er...shit-kicker
shoes,

long skirts, dark clothing,
wintertime heavy coats,

lots of scarves.

She treated people as people
and whether she liked people,

that was another story that day
or she didn't like people that day.

And she did not like women
who were trying to act like women.

If you had make-up on, I think
she basically would cut you off.

Men - aggressive or too many
questions.

"Goodbye - could someone else
take care of me?"

I mean, she was right to the point.

Sometimes, very rarely, she would
open up the roll, to decide...

She'd say, "Come here," and you know,
"You can look at them with me."

But not too often,
mainly it was private.

I don't honestly remember
the pictures,

just that it was black and white
and it was people things.

With a Rolleiflex,
she had just 12 shots

and then had to reload the film -

not easy in the open air.

She shot about a roll of film a day.

She spent virtually all her earnings
on film, equipment and storage.

Unlike most photographers,

Vivian tended to take just one shot
and move on.

Her hit rate was phenomenal.

This is a roll of film, the order
in which they were taken.

It's kids getting on a bus
in the morning for school.

She drops them off,

and then she heads downtown
and she starts photographing.

You really get this sense of a day
in the life or of a diary here,

and you can see how she moves
through the street.

If you put it all in a row

you would see one woman's life

unfolding on film in this way -

you'd have an unbroken string
of images of what she saw,

of what her experiences were.

This is what her big project was,
it was her life.

It was experiencing life
through photography.

She'll come upon somebody

who seems to be either in crisis
or contemplating something,

people who seemed to be kind of lost
in, in a world of deep thought...

..and she was able to capture
this image

and this is really a portrait,
it's a portrait of a person,

it's not just a shot of a random
person walking down the street,

she's captured a real,
raw emotion here.

As interested as she was
in other people,

she gave away very little
about herself.

My father hired her in part because
she had a European background,

which my father did as well.

Oftentimes, around the dinner
table, for example,

they would speak in French.

Vivian was a rather
opinionated woman.

She had political leanings

that I think were more on the left
and feminist,

but I would say that, wholly apart
from her political opinions

is perhaps the way that she carried
them off.

She was an extremely
abrasive person,

and often times it was pretty much
in your face. And that was Vivian.

When people tried to elicit
information about her,

she would quickly change the topic.

In terms of her upbringing
and background,

there was nothing that I ever
really...got to know.

She was creating a play for children
in the backyard

and she would assign roles
to all the children.

They said, "Well, what role
are you going to play?"

And she just looked around and said,
"I'll be the mystery woman."

There were times when the parents
would ask her,

"So you lived in France, was
that during the Occupation?"

And she'd respond, "Maybe."

So she really enjoyed
having this air of mystery.

And I think the mystery
is still there.

In just the area of Chicago
where Vivian lived,

Pamela Bannos is doing
forensic research

on what she calls Vivian Maier's
fractured archive.

Split between the different owners.

These are ones that Vivian chose.

That she chose to save.

She's also digging deep
into Vivian's mysterious past.

..Hold in her hand and look at...

I see Vivian Maier as a woman

who is the product of the legacy
of the French women before her.

She is the daughter of a woman

who was the daughter of another woman

who were all live-in servants
in New York.

She is also today somebody else
entirely,

who I think has been invented by
people who love a good story, maybe.

THEY CHUCKLE

Her grandmother, Eugenie Jaussaud,

had a child out of wedlock
at the age of 16.

She left the Champsaur Valley,
of France, sort of a shamed woman.

She arrives in New York in 1901,

leaving her baby behind,

and then essentially becomes
a live-in cook

for the rest of her life.

So Vivian's grandmother Eugenie

leaves her illegitimate daughter
behind in France

to become a cook -
and then what happens?

In 1914, her daughter, Maria
Jaussaud, arrives in Manhattan,

travelling with an American woman,
as her private maid.

She's in New York,
never having seen her mother.

In 1919, Vivian's mother
married her father,

an Austrian-Hungarian,
Charles Maier.

And on her marriage certificate,

she changes her parents' names

to make it look as though
she's legitimate.

She corrects the family history,

so she sort of invents herself
at this point, at least on paper.

This Vivian Maier story is filled
with intrigue and secrecy

and deception and privacy,

which I think is a theme
that goes throughout.

Vivian told people
she was born in France,

but in fact

she was born in Manhattan in 1926.

Aged four, Vivian was living
in St Mary's Street, in the Bronx,

with her mother, but without
her father or her elder brother.

But, there's a woman
living with them

from a neighbouring village
in France -

a studio photographer,
Jeanne Bertrand.

Maybe she had some influence
on Vivian, the photographer to be.

Jeanne Bertrand had had
an illegitimate child

whom she'd given up to adoption,

and she'd since had
a mental breakdown.

We have these French women
with no families,

we have babies with no fathers,

we have this connection of women
who are displaced,

who then end up living
with other families

or give their children to other
families or give their children up.

Vivian Maier appears to have had
very few personal relationships.

She certainly never got married,

we don't know of any,
any other relationship.

So that would suggest
this displacement

comes from the circumstances. Yes.

In 1932, Pamela finds
Vivian's mother,

using the Swiss Benevolent Society,
home for single women,

as her address in an advert
she places in the paper

for a job as a chambermaid.

She's now calling herself
Mademoiselle Jaussaud.

Within months, she gives up

and they go to France for six years.

Vivian was to live in her mother
and grandmother's village in France

from the age of six to 12.

She was seen as something
of an outsider.

Later, Vivian was to take
thousands of photographs here.

WOMAN SPEAKS IN FRENCH

TRANSLATION: She captured my attention
because she made my imagination work.

She came from America.

It's El Dorado, especially
for a little girl of ten.

For me, she was an extra-terrestrial

who had arrived
from the United States.

She had a turned-up nose

and a runny nose.

The flat where they stayed was not
very comfortable, or very warm.

MAN SPEAKS IN FRENCH

TRANSLATION: She didn't think
like us at all.

I remember one day, we noticed some
chickens scratching in a farmyard.

She was disgusted, and decided
never to eat eggs again.

All the boys in the village were
very pleased to be in her company.

She was a bit reserved.

I'd often see her in the village
square playing Marelle,

a game where you draw squares -

there's hell and heaven, paradise,

and you jump by throwing a stone.

I remember she threw it a long way.

We were all looking at her knickers.

SHE CHUCKLES

TRANSLATION: That's my mother,
my mother!

In the shop,

we had a cake shop...

It's good, this photo.
I'd like to have it.

Usually, she was preoccupied,

there was so much work,

but here, she looks calm.

TRANSLATION: All that is very,
very long ago.

After 12 more years in New York,

a 24-year-old Vivian
visited the village again.

It was soon after
the Second World War.

How she learned to use a camera
remains a mystery,

but she knew what she was doing.

These are her first known pictures,

previously dismissed as snapshots.

When I started looking
through these pictures,

I started wondering which photographs
these people were talking about,

because what I was seeing
was extremely different.

This is not a child working
with an innocent machine,

this is a woman who knows
how to work a camera.

This is the box camera,
the humble snapshot camera.

Literally, it has one, one shutter
speed, and no other adjustment.

And the suggestion is that this is
what she used in, in France. Right.

But she wasn't, in fact
she might have been using a camera

not dissimilar to this. Correct.

This particular camera
is probably from the 1940s.

You can focus it, you can
adjust the shutter speeds,

you can adjust the apertures,

you could fold it down

and it collapses into itself.

This could also be considered
a traveller's camera.

She was developing the skills
that would become her hallmark.

Right early on,

you see her observe a character
sitting on a stoop or something

in a public space,
and she works around him.

She followed her inner line
of curiosity,

and it's that that establishes
an artistic tendency,

cos the amateur doesn't do that.

Vivian was in France to sort out
the sale of a farm

that belonged to her great-aunt,
who'd died during the war.

It was called Beauregard,
"beautiful view".

Her grandfather lived nearby.

He was poor, teased by the village
boys, almost an outcast.

It was a horrible echo of what would
happen to Vivian herself

and to her mother, who would end
up in a seedy hotel in New York.

Nelly lived next door.

SHE SPEAKS IN FRENCH

TRANSLATION: It's me there,

like two sisters.

Wherever I went, she'd come with me.

What everybody said was,
they all thought she was a spy,

because she took photographs
all over the place.

My parents and I never thought
anything like that.

Look at her there, she's beautiful,
it looks just like her.

She was refined, and sincere
above all.

That's what I remember about her.

On Sundays, we'd all go to dances,
but she didn't go to dances.

SHE CLEARS HER THROAT

And she never married,
she never made a life for herself.

Yet she's a pretty woman.

This morning,
you've brought me something

which has made me very happy -
to see her again.

It was a joy.

Vivian roamed the area, taking
views of mountains and monuments.

She was, it seems, making postcards

through the camera shop
in the village,

so maybe, at this point,

she was hoping to make photography
into a career.

The spy story grew -

and the idea that she had a gun to
defend herself.

A woman wandering alone is the stuff
from which myths are made.

In the nearby town of Gap

she photographed a Communist Party
rally,

and she was always seeking out
people living on the edge.

In the spring of 1951,

she heads back across the ocean
to New York.

It's as though Vivian
was seeing the city

in which she'd spent most
of her life for the first time.

'She's 26 years old
when she's doing this -

'hopeful years, when you have
your life ahead of you.

'She's learned everything so fast,
she's learned how to look

'and she's going to places
that are new.

'We're actually walking
in her footsteps.

'It feels sort of uncanny
to look through the camera

'and see the same things.'

And then, I guarantee you she shoots
the East River right here.

This is obviously something
that we can catch better on foot

than, than in a car.

She goes to these heights

and creates these vistas.

These reminded me
of the photographs

that she had shot in the Alps,
in France,

when she was there in 1950.

Now, like her grandmother
and mother before her,

she turned to domestic service
and started to work as a nanny.

And, ever more intensely,
as a photographer.

She's on the balcony of the Hotel
Astor for the Macy's Day Parade.

You can see from the right

she's actually standing
with a bunch of children.

These children might be her charges,
mightn't they? They might be, right.

She gets access to these places

because she's working for wealthy
families who get access to places.

But often, she creates
her own access.

So she's standing in the shadow
here, by this wall,

seeing Salvador Dali
behind that post,

actually giving an autograph
to a woman

at the doorway to the Museum
Of Modern Art.

She actually walks down the street
here following Dali,

and shoots the second photograph

and she's caught him in this moment.

She dates the photograph

to the 24th of January, 1952,

and this is the time
when there's the exhibition

Five French Photographers
at the Museum Of Modern Art.

So I'm assuming
that she crossed that doorway

and she went into the museum
and she saw this exhibition.

She was teaching herself
about photography,

and it's now that Vivian made
the switch to her trademark camera,

the Rolleiflex,

with its large square negative.

It's the first Rolleiflex picture
I found

and it's taken on the 12th of July,
1952,

as she writes on the back
of the print.

She's capturing the vivid contrast
of the city.

She's found her subject matter.

In 1952, the hottest summer
on record in New York,

Vivian is crossing the city
with her new camera.

This is the Third Avenue train
that she took up and down

and when it gets down below a
certain point, it's the Bowery.

So by the time she leaves New York,
the train has been dismantled.

Now, the Bowery is as gentrified
as the rest of Manhattan,

but then, it was a byword
for drunks and down and outs.

We're over by the Bowery bums,

where we have, like, people
like this man,

who has been beat up and he's asleep
or he's unconscious in his cart,

and men who are alcoholics
and passed out on the sidewalk.

And this sunny summer day
where she's here.

And she's actually standing
over there

taking a photograph of this man,
who's looking down at her

because she's got her Rolleiflex
at her waist.

He's looking at us, but he's looking
into the lens in this picture.

She had to be about three feet away
to get a close-up.

To go up and photograph a stranger
on the street,

you have to hold your ground
and be fearless

and take what you want,
because it's yours.

You could see that there was
something that she was interested in,

that she was going to, drawn to,
day after day.

She would keep on working certain
themes - the underdog,

the cast-aside,

the worker.

"You are too young
to fall asleep forever.

"And when you sleep,
you remind me of the dead."

She has the tools, and her work
is really taking off

and so is she.

She planned a whole year away,
but she needed a new passport.

So these images show
how she kept her own archive

by photographing her own documents.

This is the photograph
of her 1959 passport application

that shows she's lied
about her parents' death.

She checks that both
of her parents are deceased.

She checks... She checks that both
of her parents are deceased

and, in fact, also eliminates
her mother's name

from the application entirely.

'In fact, both her parents lived
another ten years,

'but in 1959, they're dead to her.

'She's cut loose.'

She actually lists all the places
she's going.

She's going to the Philippines,
Hong Kong, Indochina,

Siam, East Indies, Malaysia -

and she did this tour.

She actually did this tour?
She did this tour.

And did she take many photographs?
She took thousands of photographs.

So more than 50 years ago,

a single nanny sets off
on a world tour.

This is before motorways, before
mass air travel, before gap years.

She fits in a second visit
to her village in France

to pick up a cheque
from her great-aunt's property.

This time, she also takes in
Versailles and the Louvre.

People make an issue
of her being untaught,

but she was teaching herself.

Her visit to Paris coincides

with that of the US President,

so she shoots that too.

She's like a reporter,

but with no newspaper, no outlet.

It's really about being
alive to the world,

out in the world,

and seeing yet another
moment of...of consciousness

in which an awakened state
is what it's all about.

That you are privileged
to see that yet again,

this life is doing this for me.

You're dealing with
the disappearing moment.

It's there and it's gone,

and the only way that...it's
recognised as having happened

is you observing it, knowing it
and photographing it.

So you are the repository and,
and I, I think that...you know,

it's great if you can make prints
out of it and share this,

but, at a certain point,
if you've done it long enough,

you don't really,
you don't really have to,

it's for you, it's just for you.

But maybe working alone
with no audience

was too much of a strain in the end.

It seems the centre would not hold.

The world had opened up,

but by the late '60s,
was closing in for Vivian.

The shelter she'd found

with the Ginsberg family in Chicago

came to an end.

It wasn't until all the Ginsberg
boys went to college

that finally Mrs Ginsberg said,

"Vivian, maybe it's time now
for you to go on."

And breaking up was very hard
for them and the family.

The Ginsberg family very prominently
said that she was like Mary Poppins.

Almost all the other families
that I've talked to

all say that Mary Poppins is about
the last adjective...phrase

that they would use
in talking about Vivian.

She did have her dark side
and she had her light sides.

When she taught me,
that was wonderful,

that was just wonderful.

But, you know,

her emotions could get better of her
sometimes, and so...

just leave her be.

Oh, you didn't want her to get angry
with you, believe me.

Where there'd been pleasure,
excitement,

increasingly there was
disappointment and dread.

She witnessed the Chicago riots,
in 1968.

Bobby Kennedy being assassinated,

the chaos that was going on in '68

and her photography, very much,
you get that sense of it.

Her work after that,

she would go to the same places,
she would go,

take the same kinds of walks,

but instead of noticing beautiful
abstractions on the sidewalk

and beautiful light coming through
trees, she'd start to see garbage.

When you see the weight of all these
images, thousands of images,

just the mildewing,
wet newspapers and garbage cans...

..it, there's a weight to it and
there's, there's a power to it

and I don't think you can deny that
it somehow is linked to who she was.

It was all bad news.

It was as if she was drowning,

as if she'd given up on people.

As the years passed,
her jobs got shorter,

her hoarding and secretive behaviour
more extreme.

It was a little bit of a mystery,
what she did during the weekends,

where she stayed.

She would, you know,
take her belongings, her possessions,

often bags...of clothes
that she would, she would have,

always with her camera,

and likewise, she would return
sometimes with, you know,

new bags and more clothing.

No work exists beyond the 1980s,

but she was still carrying
her camera,

still putting rolls of film

in her own personal bucket
at Central Cameras,

rolls she couldn't afford
to collect.

That was her major difficulty

in the last 15, 20 years -

economics, not having
enough economics.

She couldn't afford
all of the things that she wanted.

Maybe more work will still emerge,

but maybe she would have preferred
if it didn't.

I don't think she would like it
at all, no.

There's too much going on,

too much delving into who she was
or what she was

and why was she this and so on,

and the trickle downs
and the trickle ups and, hey,

I like taking pictures - that was
her release, that was her world.

I didn't go to the shows to see
the interpretation of other people

of what they felt about her,
cos I have my own feelings about her

and I respect the way she was.

Maybe I would have learned
something,

but would it have been the truth?

It would have been someone else's
interpretation of a truth.

Yet she's caught the imagination
of a world

captivated with taking pictures
incessantly on their phones.

Vivian has gone viral.

She now lives on the web,

but she lived in her imagination.

Her compulsion to take pictures
was her life.

It's what she has left behind.

Some of the pictures of Vivian's
were from when I was a kid,

cos I was probably there,
and I didn't even realise.

I probably walked past her,

but I never would have known.

Can you contact them

and see what's happening with
the main show in Shanghai? Yeah...

'You see, our work isn't our work
until it's shared,

'somebody else has to see it.'

She did have a very private life,

so I think she would not be very
happy about that,

about people knowing about her.

As her story dissipates, and our
stories dissipate as they should,

and the work remains, that's, I
think she would be thrilled with it.

In 200 years, if people are
looking at her work,

I'd be absolutely delighted
and I think she would be also.

You know, at some point, I think
I'm going to give some away,

maybe one a week for a bunch
of weeks and see what happens.

Give them back to the streets,
so to speak.

Look at all this, this is only
one third of what I have.

There's three times this,

so there's more than enough.

There's people grabbing cameras
right now,

they're doing a lot of street
photography because of Vivian.

I can't give away the rabbits,

that's my favourite.

It must have been around 2007
or so, I was on my way to work

and I saw her walking
down the street,

and I had a moment where I thought,

"Oh, should I...come over,

"walk over and say hello?"

And I just didn't, I was running
a little late and I just thought...

So I stood there
and I just kind of watched her walk,

and I thought, "Wow!

"Vivian's still going strong,
that is strange."

Right at the end of her life,

a neighbour caught sight of her
round the rubbish bins.

I first saw her in the neighbourhood

in the alleys.

She used to be carrying
shopping bags, books.

I thought she was homeless.

When I swim, I started noticing her
over here.

She used to sit over here
behind these trees,

kind of a...I don't know, out of
the way, she didn't really want,

she didn't want to be bothered,
I think she knew she was different.

She'd just be staring at the lake.

I'd swim for a half hour out there
and

I'd look up and she would be gone.