Biography · Level 5 · 217 words

Vivian Maier's Hidden Negatives

Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.

In 2007 a young man in Chicago bought a box of negatives at a storage auction for a few hundred dollars. He was researching a neighborhood and hoped for old street scenes. What he had bought, it turned out, was the life's work of a woman who had shown it to almost no one.

Vivian Maier spent forty years as a nanny for families in Chicago and New York. On her days off, often with a child in tow, she walked the city with a twin-lens camera held at her waist, a design that let her look down into the viewfinder and photograph people who never noticed. She made well over a hundred thousand exposures. Thousands of rolls were never developed. She had no exhibition, no gallery, no reviews.

The story is usually told as a happy accident: genius saved from a dumpster. It is worth pausing on the other reading. A person who photographs relentlessly for four decades and never shows the work may not be waiting to be discovered. She kept her rooms locked and gave strangers a false name. Her fame is entirely posthumous, arranged by people she never met, out of images she chose not to publish, which is a kind of luck, and also a question no one can now ask her.

Comprehension questions

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4 questions
1. Which statement best captures the main idea of the passage?

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D. Maier's huge hidden body of work made her famous after death, and the writer questions the cheerful way that story is usually told.
Paragraphs one and two supply the discovery and the scale of the work; paragraph three turns and challenges the standard telling. She did not sell the work, and the buyer is not the photographer.

2. What was the buyer hoping to find when he bought the box?

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C. Old street scenes for his neighborhood research
The text says he 'was researching a neighborhood and hoped for old street scenes.' The undeveloped rolls were part of what he actually got, not what he wanted.

3. What does the writer suggest by mentioning the locked rooms and the false name?

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A. That Maier may have wanted both her life and her work kept private.
Those two facts arrive right after the claim that she may not have been waiting to be discovered. They are offered as evidence of a wish for privacy, which is what makes her posthumous fame uneasy.

4. In the passage, 'posthumous' means:

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B. happening after a person's death
Her fame was 'arranged by people she never met' and rests on a question 'no one can now ask her.' Both phrases place the fame after she died.

Source: Written for Fluency. Original passage © Studio AM, written for Fluency.