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.

Colin Westerbeck is the author of numerous books on photography, including Chuck Close: Photographer; A Democracy of Imagery; and with Joel Meyerowitz, Bystander, A History of Street Photography. The former curator of photography at the Art Institute of Chicago and former director of the California Museum of Photography at the University of California, Riverside, he has written a weekly column on photography for the Los Angeles Times and is a frequent contributor to Art in America. He lives in Los Angeles.