BBC to air fascinating documentary on the lost photos of street photographer Vivian Maier

 

 

There's something universally appealing about an undiscovered artist finally getting their place in the sun. In the case of Vivian Maier, a virtually unknown street photographer whose stirring, black-and-white work was discovered in a storage locker only a few years before her death in 2009, her story has inspired not one but two documentary films, so far. In February, we shared a trailer for "Finding Vivian Maier," an independent documentary, that began as a Kickstarter project and is still awaiting release.

Now the BBC is set to air it's own documentary, which tracks the story of Maier, who worked as a nanny in Chicago for 40 years, beginning in the mid-1950s, during which time she shot over 100,000 street photos of the residents and cityscapes of the area. Most of Maier's images went undeveloped until Chicago historian John Maloof purchased a treasure trove of the negatives at a storage locker auction in 2007. Maier's work is now being hailed as some of the best street photography of the 20th Century, with comparisons to Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Weegee.

The BBC documentary, which will air on the BBC One's "imagine..." series on June 25, 2013, is titled: "Vivian Maier: Who Took Nanny's Pictures?"

"People found it hard to believe that Mary Poppins with a camera could have taken these pictures," the narrator says in the below trailer for the BBC documentary. "It's a classic parable of the artist, unsung in life."

(Via Reddit)