Many months ago I did a post here about the Chicago street photographer Vivian Maier. She was the children’s nanny who, over several decades, shot tens of thousands of street photos. Her work, of very high quality, was only discovered after her death, when photography collectors bought the bulk of her negatives at an abandoned goods auction. In 2013 there was a riveting documentary about Maier called Finding Vivian Maier. I highly recommend you check it out.

Well, subsequently a fly flew into the ointment, in the form of an attorney who located a cousin of Maier’s. This cousin, in all likelihood, owned some or all of the rights to her images. This led to the legal standoff just now apparently resolved.

On one side you had collectors who owned the negatives needed to make and sell prints and posters and other imagery involving Maier’s work. On the other side was the cousin who owned the intellectual property rights, without which none of the images could be sold. Kind of a legal deadlock.

But now, hopefully, we can begin to see more of the photographic riches that Maier mined over the course of her adult life.

Go here to read the Chicago Tribune story on the settlement. The details are being kept confidential by order of the judge.