I tried googling why she didn't seem to get prints made and found this at the top of the heap...
Information about the Photographer Vivian Maier, a person who fit the stereotypical European sensibilities of an independent liberated woman, accent and all, yet born in New York City.
www.vivianmaier.com
"In 1956, when Maier moved to Chicago, she enjoyed the luxury of a darkroom as well as a private bathroom. This allowed her to process her prints and develop her own rolls of B&W film. As the children entered adulthood, the end of Maier’s employment from that first Chicago family in the early seventies forced her to abandon developing her own film. As she would move from family to family, her rolls of undeveloped, unprinted work began to collect.
It was around this time that Maier decided to switch to color photography, shooting on mostly Kodak Ektachrome 35mm film, using a Leica IIIc, and various German SLR cameras. The color work would have an edge to it that hadn’t been visible in Maier’s work before that, and it became more abstract as time went on. People slowly crept out of her photos to be replaced with found objects, newspapers, and graffiti.
Similarly, her work was showing a compulsion to save items she would find in garbage cans or lying beside the curb.
In the 1980s Vivian would face another challenge with her work. Financial stress and lack of stability would once again put her processing on hold and the color Ektachrome rolls began to pile. Sometime between the late 1990’s and the first years of the new millennium, Vivian would put down her camera and keep her belongings in storage while she tried to stay afloat. She bounced from homelessness to a small studio apartment which a family she used to work for helped to pay. With meager means, the photographs in storage became lost memories until they were sold off due to non-payment of rent in 2007. The negatives were auctioned off by the storage company to RPN Sales, who parted out the boxes in a much larger auction to several buyers including John Maloof."
I suppose we'll never know for certain but the cost could have been a real factor limiting her developing and printing, as opposed to eccentricity or disinterest.
PS.
Just read that she did about 5,000 prints... a fraction. It'd be interesting if we could compare these to those processed by others to see if there's any significant difference other than we'd expect due to changes in style and subject over time.
A movie about this mysterious photographer was nominated for an Oscar
www.lensculture.com
"Besides the negatives, there are about 5,000 vintage prints that Maier made between 1965-1973, when she was living in Chicago. During those years, she was a nanny and living in the house of the family she worked for. She had her own bedroom and bathroom and transformed her bathroom into a personal darkroom. This was the first and last time she had access to a darkroom in her life."
PPS.
I'm not into street photography at all but some of VM's pictures are IMO just stunning and have influenced how I take people pictures.
