Vivian Maier, evidently one of America’s more insightful street photographers, has at last been discovered. The release of every fresh image on the Web causes a sensation among the growing legion of her admirers. (Frankly, Lens is late to the table.) Ms. Maier’s streetscapes manage simultaneously to capture a redolent sense of place and the paradoxical moments that give the city its jazz, while elevating and dignifying the people in her frames — vulnerable, noble, defeated, proud, fragile, tender and often quite funny. Harry Callahan is just one of the masters with whom Ms. Maier is already being compared.

Beginning Friday, she is to be honored with a one-woman show, “Finding Vivian Maier: Chicago Street Photographer,” at the Chicago Cultural Center in the Loop. The opening reception will take place from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m.

Sadly, Ms. Maier won’t be able to attend. She died two years ago, at 83.

There is, obviously, a back story here. But if you haven’t already taken the time simply to look at her pictures, please do so now. Carve out some quiet space for yourself. Open up Lens to full screen mode, if your computer allows. Take a long breath. And just look.

Remarkable, aren’t they?

The constabulary and the citizenry perform an intimate pas de deux in Slide 7. Preaching magisterially, looking taller than the brownstones behind him, he’d like to be reasonable — if the lady would just pipe down. And her? She’d knock his block off in a minute if he weren’t a cop. His eight-point cap finds an echo in the theater marquee that almost could serve as her crown, since this is clearly her turf. Their roles are well rehearsed. But there is a real tension in the meeting of their hands. You don’t know how this will play out.

Another kind of intimacy reveals itself sweetly in Slide 14. Two halves of an elderly couple, together so long that their bodies have almost merged, incline once more toward one another on what looks like a ferryboat. He may seem indifferent to her at first glance, but the broad brim of his hat sweeps protectively across her face, almost as if his arm were around her shoulder. And over that shoulder, another passenger seems to be looking reproachfully at the photographer, as if she has trespassed some private communion.

Elsewhere, Ms. Maier captured moments that were unlikely (Slide 13), incongruous (Slide 9), amusing (Slide 4) and mysteriously beckoning (Slide 2). Chicago Magazine has many more photographs in its gallery.

What is known about Ms. Maier is that she was born in New York in 1926, lived in France (her mother was French) and returned to New York in 1951. Five years later, she moved to Chicago, where she worked for about 40 years as a nanny, principally for families in the North Shore suburbs. On her days off, she wandered the streets of New York and Chicago, most often with a Rolleiflex twin-lens reflex camera. Apparently, she did not share her pictures with others. Many of them, she never saw herself. She left behind hundreds of undeveloped rolls.

Even if you don’t think Ms. Maier has the makings of a minor master from the mid-20th century whose work can now be appreciated, you’ll probably be affected by at least a few of her photos.

And if you’re nearing 60 and grew up Chicago, you’re almost bound to feel — as I do — that a precious past has been rescued that we didn’t even know existed; thousands of blinks of the civic eye, tens of thousands of beats of the public heart.

But wait (as we say in Chicago), there’s more.

John Maloof, a 29-year-old eBay entrepreneur and real estate agent, is now principal cheerleader in the effort to find a niche for Ms. Maier at the pantheon of modern photography. He is only about one-tenth of the way into the task of scanning and archiving 100,000 negatives of hers in his possession, working with his friend Anthony Rydzon. And they have yet to develop several hundred rolls of black-and-white film and about 600 color rolls.

Another large collection — including 12,000 negatives and 70 homemade movies — is in the hands of Jeff Goldstein and his collaborators at Vivian Maier Photography.

Mr. Maloof acquired his first boxful of her negatives for $400 at an auction in 2007. They had been in a commercial storage locker whose contents were seized for non-payment. He was interested in them because they depicted Chicago scenes and he was working with Daniel Pogorzelski on an illustrated history of the Portage Park neighborhood for Arcadia’s Images of America series.

He didn’t find any pictures of Portage Park. Indeed, he wasn’t exactly sure what he had found. “I didn’t know what ‘street photography’ was when I purchased them,” he wrote on his Vivian Maier blog.

Eventually, on Oct. 9, 2009, Mr. Maloof did what so many do these days: put the question to the blogosphere, through Hardcore Street Photography on Flickr:

I guess my question is, what do I do with this stuff? Check out the blog. Is this type of work worthy of exhibitions, a book? Or do bodies of work like this come up often? Any direction would be great.

Direction, suggestions, counsel, advice and appreciative comments arrived quickly. So did conspiracy theories. “Could this be a hoax?” wondered a commenter under the name Film Noir Anti-Hero. Another, known simply as Greg, replied: “The idea being that somebody has been running around taking a lot of photos of people dressed up as if they were living in the ’40s with a T.L.R. in order to publish them on the Web and giving all the credit to someone who has recently died?”

Fittingly, Mr. Maloof’s second post in what is now a very long thread reported: “I just contacted the Chicago Cultural Center and applied for an exhibition with the curator. It takes a few months for a response. They were very nice, by the way.” (Lanny Silverman, the chief curator of exhibitions at the center, is responsible for the show.)

Clearly, the higher Ms. Maier rises in professional and curatorial esteem, the more Mr. Maloof stands to benefit financially as the owner of so many of her negatives. But with boyish interjections like “holy cow” peppering his speech, it’s easy to believe that his true interest right now is ensuring that Ms. Maier’s work reaches the widest audience.

At the moment, he is riding the crest of a wave far larger than anything he imagined 15 months ago: the exhibition, a book and a documentary film, “Finding Vivian Maier,” he’s producing with Mr. Rydzon.

No, Mr. Maloof doesn’t believe it. Watching a segment recently on WTTW about the discovery of Ms. Maier’s work, he found himself in tears. He recalled thinking: “Wow! This is about something that I did.”