... an engrossing and beautiful biography highlighted by Maier’s exceptional photographs ... To fill in the blanks of Maier’s life, Marks brought into play a panoply of talents: extraordinary sleuthing skills, intuition, resourcefulness and persistence; profound empathy; an astute visual aesthetic and highly developed powers of observation; and last but not least, a logical and lucid prose style ... And so now we have the whole story—or just about the whole story—of Vivian Maier ... Marks believes that although she never sought recognition in her lifetime, Maier would have thoroughly enjoyed the unexpected way her posthumous story has unfolded ... Now there’s another thing she would likely love—the astounding work Marks herself has done in creating this biography. You will surely close this excellent book feeling inspired.

Marks...tells Maier’s life with the intimacy of a scrapbook—and, at various points, the sanctioned intrusiveness of a detective log ... hoarding, Marks convincingly argues, was a sign of mental illness, a likely explanation for the supposed mystery of Maier’s extreme privacy that should be fully aired and destigmatized, rather than shrugged off as mere eccentricity ... Eager to follow this theory throughout the Maier bloodline, Marks sometimes displays the indiscrimination of that relative who has gone giddy on ancestry websites, tracing lineage until it blurs beyond recognition ... But the bulk of Vivian Maier Developed is a thorough, fascinating overview of an artist working for art’s sake, and a forceful case for further exposure rather than discretion in the name of kid-gloved pity. To add my own appendix: Marks’s selection of photographs, artifacts and documents is judicious and satisfying, but the book’s format reduces many to small squares. Bring a magnifying glass.

Ms. Marks, a former senior executive at Dow Jones, got to work, tracking down 30 interview subjects who knew Maier while unearthing scraps of evidence from archives spread across two continents. She has done an excellent job of excavating the photographer’s chaotic backstory, twining the work more tightly with the life ... Ms. Marks’s biography is strongest when she is disentangling her subject’s complex lineage ... Vivian Maier Developed is a gorgeous artifact printed on heavy stock, which allows Ms. Marks to sprinkle her narrative with crisp reproductions of Maier’s photos, as well as key pieces of evidence Marks found during her research (an appendix lays out Ms. Marks’s process, fascinating in its own right). Unfortunately, much of her descriptive text reads like an extended set of captions for the pictures. Still, this book is far and away the most complete picture we have of the photographer to date. While it’s always tricky to align an artist’s output with her inner life, Marks has given us a way of seeing Maier that deepens our understanding of the mystery, and then methodically unravels it.

... despite oodles of research and fresh material, Vivian Maier Developed never quite advances the narrative from Vivian Maier the Enigma to merely Vivian Maier the Artist ... despite ranging childhood to death, laying it all out with care and clarity, here is an undeveloped life, waiting for an authoritative, critical assessment. Which is what Marks sets out to do; she moves in the right direction. Maier’s photos are sprinkled on page after page, with nuggets of insights on most, along with a welcome discussion of Maier’s relationship to her fellow photographers, and a better look at the ideas that inhabited Maier’s world ... But it’s an odd book, haphazardly organized — many of the controversies linked with Maier’s discovery, an assessment of her staying power, even some of her history are never woven into that story but saved for a lengthy appendix. So we get leaps where gaps appear ... Regardless of what you think of her photographs, regardless of the attention she has received in the 12 years since her work became known, Vivian Maier deserves better than we have given her ... I’m no photography critic; or even a book critic. But as someone captivated by Maier’s photos who wondered what I was looking at, I come away from Vivian Maier Developed still uncertain why she mattered, or how this work compares with, say, Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank, to name two photographers who shared Maier’s attention to social justice and plain ordinary existence. Marks offers a handful of outside ideas from the New York Times — nay, yea, meh — then moves on ... If I sound disappointed, I am — personally.

... a meticulously documented narrative replete with images born of Maier’s 40-year love affair with photography ... Compelling and richly detailed, this book sheds new and important light on an intriguing photographer and her singular life ... A well-researched and incisive biography of an artist who should be better known.

Treating Maier like a riddle makes for good jacket copy but can also turn her into a kind of Rorschach: One sees in her whatever the critical mode du jour demands ... Although Marks acknowledges that it’s impossible to accurately diagnose Marie [Vivian's mother], this doesn’t stop her from premising the whole biography on such drive-by psychologizing. Indeed, the book is a case study for what responsible biographers shouldn’t do. Some of Marks’s theories are more credible than others ... One of the assets of her largely lackluster biography is the gumshoe work she does chasing down [Vivian's father] Carl’s records and filling in his story ... her creativity, her art, is inextricable from mental illness. That’s a generic enough argument, but in Marks’s hands, it turns cloying. Her interpretations of Maier’s work sometimes take unfortunate cues from clinical analyses ... As I read, I was increasingly irritated by this reductive and patronizing portrayal of Maier ... by pressing her into a queasy Hallmark narrative of a woman triumphing over her demons, Marks’s biography unintentionally undervalues Maier’s achievement. Photography wasn’t a 'coping mechanism' but her life’s work.

With the keen eye of a detective and persistence of a genealogist, researcher Marks unravels the complicated story of 'nanny wonder' Vivian Maier (1926–2009), one of the 20th century’s most enigmatic street photographers ...Drawing from her extensive access to Maier’s archives, Marks vividly evokes a woman full of both tragic and amusing complexities ... In doing so, the author shines a light on the “intelligence, creativity, [and] passion” behind Maier’s preternatural ability to capture 'the universality of the human condition.' This definitive account will leave readers in awe.