![]() ![]() Though some of the children she helped raise supported Maier after they came of age, she couldn’t make the payments on a storage locker she rented. Maier’s recent, sudden ascent from reclusive eccentric to esteemed photographer is one of the more remarkable stories in American photography. ![]() After all, she says, Maier is “a photographer of consequence now.” But her photograph of Carole Pohn and her children Andy and Jennifer Levant, from 1962 or ’63, is one of the very few prints Maier ever shared she gave it to Pohn, a painter, telling her she was “the only civilized person in Highland Park.” Pohn says she tacked the print up on a bulletin board “with a million other things”-an act that embarrasses her today. She’d snap pictures of anything or anyone as she lugged her charges on field trips into Chicago, photographing the elderly, the homeless, the lost. Her real name was Vivian Maier, and she wore a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera around her neck, more body part than accessory. “I was coming toward the car,” Levant recalls, “and she just stuck the lens in there in the window and took a picture.” Residents of the Chicago suburb of Highland Park had gotten used to the nanny doing that, along with her French accent, her penchant for wearing men’s coats and boots, and the look and gait that led children to call her “bird lady.” Brian Levant’s mother, brother and sister were waiting to give him a ride home from the skating rink one day in the early 1960s when the neighbors’ nanny appeared. ![]()
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