American photographer Vivian Maier was BOTD in 1926. Born in New York City to Austrian immigrant parents, she moved between France and the United States frequently as a child, settling in Chicago in adulthood. She worked as a nanny for nearly 40 years, using her days off to take photographs in the streets of Chicago. While some of the children in her care later described her as kind and inspiring, others recalled her as violent and abusive. In the late 1950s, she undertook a solo trip around the world, visiting Asia, the Middle East and Europe. She is estimated to have taken over 150,000 photos, most of which were never published during her lifetime. Her work, an arresting combination of documentary-like street photography and carefully composed art pieces, revealed a woman unnoticed by those around her, with an intense appreciation for the community and loneliness of city life. In her numerous self-portraits, Maier appeared as an aloof, androgynous figure, often dressed in men’s clothing and hats. She became destitute in later life, relying on financial help from her former clients to avoid eviction. In 2007, her failure to keep up payments on rented storage space resulted in her photo negatives, prints, audio recordings and film being auctioned, eventually purchased by photo collectors John Maloof, Ron Slattery and Randy Prow. Maier died in 2009 in Oak Park, Illinois, aged 83. Shortly after her death, Maloof published her photos on social media site Flickr, receiving international media attention. Her work has since been curated and exhibited around the world, praised for its artistic merit and historical record of mid-century American life. Her life and work was the subject of the Oscar-nominated 2013 documentary Finding Vivian Maier. Though nothing is known about her sexuality or relationships, the outsider’s perspective in her work has a distinctly queer sensibility.