The exceptional story of masterful nanny street photographer Vivian Maier (19262009) continues to unfold, entrancing viewers and readers everywhere. The documentary film Finding Vivian Maier (2014) provides a wider lens on her life, and now the superbly gifted writing and photo restoration duo, Richard Cahan and Michael Williams, bring out their second Maier book, following the revelatory Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows (2012). Here they publish for the first time 100 pristine and electrifying portraits of strangers the rapturously observant Maier encountered by chance and swiftly connected with eye-to-eye. Attaining particular rapport with the young and the old, Maier elicited smiles and scowls as she courageously roamed, cameras around her neck, streets and byways in New York City, Chicago, Florida, the French countryside, Malaysia, Thailand, and Yemen. Cahan and Williams suggest that Maier's work as a domestic enhanced her ability to astutely, intimately, and forthrightly scrutinize people and their worlds. The longer you gaze at these sumptuously printed black-and-white photographs, taken from 1949 into the 1970s, the more you realize how brilliantly and vibrantly composed they are and how captivated resolute and relentless Maier was by the power of faces and by people's profound relationships with their surroundings. Maier's portraits, radiant flashes of mutual recognition, are breathtaking works of art.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2014, American Library Association.)
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