Ten years after Vivian Maier’s death, Gaëlle Josse tells the story of one of the most mysterious figures in contemporary north-american photography. With tremendous insight, she offers us the tale of an unusual, unique, discreet and obscure life that has now tipped over into posthumous fame – fame that is inversely proportional to the tremendous discretion she showed throughout her life.

Shortly after she passed away, entirely unknown, at age 83, Vivian Maier’s stunning negatives, which reveal tremendous humanity and concern for the poorest people, those for whom the American Dream never came true, were found by chance in some boxes forgotten in storage in the suburbs of Chicago. She never got a chance to enjoy the fame or the worldwide enthusiasm that her artwork now inspires. She lived a solitary, poverty-stricken existence, weighted down by family secrets and hardship. A complex and sometimes disconcerting person, a magnificent loser who was totally free, her life story encompasses both France and the United States, where she chose to live with her eyes wide open.

Une femme en contre-jour is the portrait of an invisible woman, a brilliant photographer who never saw most of her photos and who worked as a nanny in order to keep a roof over her head. A Franco-American with a keen eye for the mean streets of New York and Chicago, who never forgot her happy childhood in the French Alps.