Westerbeck, Colin: Vivian Maier: The Color Work

The first monograph of color photographs by American street photographer Vivian Maier Photographer Vivian Maier’s allure endures even though many details of her life continue to remain a mystery. Her story—the secretive Chicago nanny whose work was discovered in two storage lockers up for auction as a result of her failure to pay the rent—has only been pieced together from the thousands of images she made and the handful of facts that have surfaced about her life. Vivian Maier: The Color Work is the largest and most highly curated collection of Maier’s full-color photographs published to date. With a foreword by world-renowned photographer Joel Meyerowitz and text by curator Colin Westerbeck, this definitive volume sheds light on the nature of Maier’s color images, examining them within the context of her black-and-white work as well as the images of street photographers with whom she clearly had kinship, like Eugène Atget and Lee Friedlander. With more than 150 color photographs, most of which have never been published in book form, this collection of images deepens our understanding of Maier, as its immediacy demonstrates how keen she was to record and present her interpretation of the world around her.