Surely you’ve heard the tale that has become an art world campfire favorite: In 2007, five storage lockers were sold at an Indiana auction. Among the items were 120,000 photos, contact sheets and undeveloped film rolls, later traced to a humble nanny, a Chicago woman named Vivian Maier who happened to be an amateur street photographer with the eye of a master. None of her work had ever been published, and then, around the time she died in 2009 at 83, there were museum shows, books, a burgeoning legend. Many of us have been so taken with the story of these old photos we never noticed how new the work feels, how Maier’s photography, seemingly casual and certainly obsessive, presaged photography in the digital age. The contact sheets that ring the Chicago History Museum show, “Vivian Maier’s Chicago,” seem like ancestors of the random shots stacking up on iPhones and Flickr accounts, seemingly unbroken documents of what a person with a camera runs across. Ongoing at Chicago History Museum, 1601 N. Clark St.; 312-642-4600, chicagohs.org
