Today she is one of the stars of street photography, bearing comparison with legends like Helen Levitt or Diane Arbus—yet during her lifetime no one ever saw a single photograph of hers. For forty years Vivian Maier worked as a nanny and, almost incidentally, took 140,000 photographs: an impressive body of work she never showed anyone until her death. Since the sensational chance discovery of her images at a storage-locker auction in 2007 and the Oscar-nominated documentary Finding Vivian Maier, her photographs have traveled the world, celebrated by critics and public and exhibited in renowned galleries—pictures of the streets of France, Hong Kong, New York and Chicago in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, marked by great empathy, humor and a fine feeling for light, symmetry and color. In her carefully researched biography Ann Marks approaches a woman who fled her family’s rejection, violence, addiction and mental illness, and discovered her love of the medium. It is a great story of self-determination, courage and incorruptible creativity.