In 2007, an auction house in Chicago sold off a number of items reclaimed from unpaid debts. Among them were more than 14,000 pictures, all taken by one person, most undeveloped.
In 2007, writer and director John Maloof bought a box of photograph negatives at auction for roughly $400. He was hoping to find photos for a book about his Northwest Chicago neighborhood. He ended up with a trove of negatives, prints and undeveloped rolls shot by a former local nanny named Vivian Maier. Over the next few years, working with another collector, Jeff Goldstein, he compiled a comprehensive archive of Maier's work, introduced it to the art world and produced the 2014 Academy Award-nominated documentary "Finding Vivian Maier." After the release of the film, Maier who died in 2009 without knowing any of this became something of an international celebrity, a source of fascination not just for her work but for the mysterious circumstances of its creation.