I recently watched the documentary Finding Vivian Maier (which was originally released in 2013) and I was struck by John Maloof’s search for anyone who could tell him about who Vivian Maier truly was after her death. After her death, Vivian Maier (February 1, 1926 – April 21, 2009) gained fame as an American, Chicago-based, street photographer. During Vivian Maier’s lifetime, she was simply known to those around her as a nanny, and perhaps an eccentric with a camera around her neck.
Vivian Maier’s art was entirely discovered posthumously and it all began when John Maloof attended a local auction house in Chicago and bought 30,000 negatives for another project. In the course of considering whether the negatives were suitable for Maloof’s book on the history of the Northwest Side neighbour of Chicago, Maloof later became “obsessed with Vivian’s work, and made it his mission to reconstruct her archive”.
The documentary is a chronicle of Maloof’s mission to reconstruct her archive (and of Vivian Maier, herself), including how he found records of her birth from a New York City archive and how Maloof ended up in an remote village in France where her mother’s family lived.
Vivian Maier died unmarried and childless and, as it turns out, intestate.
According to the Chicago Tribune, a Virginia copyright lawyer and former professional photographer named David Deal became concerned that people were selling Vivian Maier’s photographs in manner that infringed copyright law. David Deal used the information that he learned from Maloof’s chronicles to locate one of Vivian Maier’s first cousins once removed. In 2014, David Deal became counsel to Francis Baille in a court case where Mr. Baille asked the probate court to name him as an heir to the Estate of Vivian Maier. Apparently, the information that David Deal used was the story of how Maloof had located another first cousin named Sylvian Jaussaud by hiring genealogists. As Maloof’s story goes, he bought Sylvian Jaussaud’s rights to Vivian Maier’s work for $5,000.00. Ultimately, Mr. Baille’s court case, which involved John Maloof and the Cook County public administrator’s office (the county where Vivian Maier died), settled under private terms that are sealed from the public.
In Ontario, where a person dies without a will, and there is no surviving spouse, children, parent, brother or sister, the property shall be distributed among the nephews and nieces. If there are no surviving nephews and nieces either, “the property shall be distributed among the next of kin of equal degree of consanguinity to the intestate equally without representation”. If there are no next of kin either, the property becomes the property of the Crown, and the Escheats Act, 2015 applies”.
For those of you who are interested, I highly recommend watching the trailer to Finding Vivian Maier here, and checking out some of Vivian Maier’s photographs here.
Thanks for reading (and watching)!