Photography: Vivian Maier: Street Photographer

(Vivian Maier: Street Photographer edited by John Maloof, published by powerHouse Books)

The detail of Vivian Maier's life is still being uncovered, but it is known that she lived in France and New York and spent 40 years as a nanny in Chicago.

An apparently solitary observer of city life, she took around 100,000 photographs – a vast body of vivid, sometimes humorous, often raw, always arresting work that she never showed to anyone. They were only rescued from oblivion after John Malouf, a local historian and now editor of this posthumous monograph, bought a box of her negatives at an auction of unclaimed storage-locker contents.