Excerpt from The Chicago Tribune -
There are thousands of previously unseen pictures taken and printed by Vivian Maier in the new donation made to the University of Chicago Library.
Yes, they are new images from the Chicago-area nanny who became famous for her photographic eye after her death — and then for the legal tussles that followed her artistic fame. And, yes, a selection of them is being shown publicly in these pages for the first time.
The entire cache includes travel shots, party shots, photos in black-and-white and color, large prints and small ones. They show her working with framing her subjects in the lens and cropping her images in the darkroom. And to a remarkable degree, all the way through the years of these photographs, they show an artist with a gift for shooting people.
A crying girl holds a wrinkled adult hand. Two older women in full dress and makeup gaze back at Maier’s lens. A line of workmen pose for the camera, as craggy and iconic as the mountains behind them.
The prints were donated by John Maloof, the Chicago collector who owns the great bulk of known Maier work. After a smaller donation of prints to the university library two years ago, they represent all the Maier prints he owned.