One hit from a Google search linked to an item from the Chicago Tribune that had been posted just days before. Scribbled in pencil was a name: Vivian Maier. He found an envelope from a photo lab buried in one of the boxes. One day in late April 2009, more than a year after he bought that first box at RPN, Maloof got a break. Maloof realized that he’d come across something special, and he determined to crack the case of the anonymous photographer. They proved startlingly popular-some sold for as much as $80 a pop. With the collection becoming expensive to maintain, this lifelong reseller did what came naturally: He cut up some of the negatives and hawked them on eBay. As time passed, Maloof tracked down a handful of people who had acquired similar caches of negatives once owned by the same woman, and he bought the boxes off them. Who took them?Ī contact at the auction house didn’t know the photographer’s name but told Maloof that the contents of the repossessed storage locker had belonged to an elderly woman who was ill. There was a playfulness to the moments the anonymous artist had captured: a dapper preschool boy peeking from the corner of a grimy store window an ample rump squeezing through the wooden planks of a park bench a man in a three-piece suit napping, supine, in the front seat of his car, his right arm masking his face from the daylight. Though he knew almost nothing about photography, he eventually returned to the box and started looking through the negatives, scanning some into his computer. Something nagged, however-perhaps a reflex picked up from working the flea market circuit as a poor kid growing up on the West Side of Chicago. A closer examination unearthed no scenes of Portage Park, though the box turned out to contain more than 30,000 negatives.
So he plunked down about $400 for the box and headed home. There’s got to be something pertinent in there, he thought.
He came across a box that had been repossessed from a storage locker, and a hasty search revealed a wealth of black-and-white shots of the Loop from the 1950s and ’60s. A third-generation reseller, Maloof hoped to find some historical photographs for a small book about Portage Park that he was cowriting on the side. On an unremarkable day in late 2007, John Maloof, a young real-estate agent, spent some time at a local auction house, RPN Sales in Portage Park, combing through assortments of stuff-some of it junk-that had been abandoned or repossessed.
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