Vivian Maier is a photographic phenomenon. Born in New York City in 1926, she worked much of her life as a nanny, helping to raise children in different homes in New York, Chicago and Los Angeles. On the side, she took photographs—brilliant pictures of what she saw in her domestic life and as a world traveller. Her pictures are filled with empathy and beauty. Much of her work, negatives and prints, was found in a Chicago storage locker just before her death in 2009. What followed was a firestorm of attention, catapulting Maier from obscurity to worldwide attention.

Richard Cahan and Michael Williams were there at the beginning when Maier’s photographs were discovered. The authors of more than a dozen books, Cahan and Williams are considered photo historians. They find history in photo collections—whether it is the work of a single photographer such as Vivian Maier or the work of large governmental projects, such the War Relocation Authority, which documented the incarceration of Japanese American during World War II. They are the authors of two books about Maier: Vivian Maier: Out of the Shadows and Eye to Eye: Photographs by Vivian Maier.