Frank Jackowiak proudly sported a badge when he arrived at the opening for Jeff Goldstein’s Vivian Maier exhibition at Russell Bowman Art Advisory in Chicago last April.

“I saw what Vivian never did,” the badge proudly read. “I processed her film.”

Mr. Jackowiak was leading about a dozen people from the College of DuPage who had been spending their Saturday afternoons processing undeveloped rolls from Mr. Goldstein’s Maier collection — the smaller of two major collections (the other belongs to John Maloof).

At the time, they were a few months into the mountainous task, which took them through last October. But Mr. Goldstein and his collaborators at Vivian Maier Prints Inc. still have work to do.

This weekend, The New York Times Magazine is running a series of the Goldstein photos — a collection that not only gives more insight into who Vivian Maier was, but further solidifies her place in the canon of photography.

Ms. Maier, a New York-born photographer, died about three years ago. Some of the work has been on exhibit at the Steven Kasher Gallery in New York and at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta. Her photos, mostly from her years in Chicago, where she worked as a nanny, remained largely unknown and unseen until after her death.

Vivian Maier/Jeffrey Goldstein Collection courtesy Steven Kasher Gallery

“The more you look at someone’s work, the more in tune you get with it,” said Mr. Goldstein, who has close to 16,000 negatives in his collection, which was originally estimated to number 12,000. “This is a rarity, where the work just gets better and better.

“We’re surprised by the consistency and strength of the work,” he added. “I would think after a while we would become numb to it, or satiated.”

Not so. Nor was it so for Team Vivian at DuPage.

Vivian Maier New, Old Photos Lens first wrote about the discovery of Vivian Maier in 2011. Frankly, we were late to the table. Read more »

“You have the film of of another photographer who’s no longer alive, so you’re the first person actually to see the images,” Mr. Jackowiak said from his home in a Chicago suburb.

Mr. Jackowiak, 56, joined the project after a chance meeting with Mr. Goldstein. He offered to recruit a team of student volunteers at DuPage, where he teaches film photography.

To his surprise, Mr. Goldstein entrusted him with the film. “I’m carrying it in these plastic containers to my truck,” Mr. Jackowiak recalled, “and he says, ‘How’s it feel to be handling the Priceless Film?’ ”

“I was going to stop at the mall on the way home, because it was right before Christmas, and I think, ‘I can’t do that.’ ”

On New Year’s Day, his curiosity got the best of him. He drove to the school — “I had a key, and it was killing me,” he said — and processed some of the 35-mm film himself. “It was an odd feeling. There was nobody else there even that I could show it to. So I just kind of looked at the images and tried to get a feel from those images what she was feeling when she took them.”

What was Vivian Maier feeling? Why was she shooting?

Courtesy of Vivian Maier Prints Inc.

“Most of her stuff answered that question, because it’s street photography,” Mr. Jackowiak said. “But there’s some other stuff that exists out here that — you don’t know why she took it.”

The images are witty; many, adventurous. Ms. Maier was fixated on certain motifs, as Stacey Baker writes for the Times magazine’s blog — whether newspapers (Slide 14) or legs (Slides 12 and 19). The photos aren’t always just street photographs; she had an interest in documenting the news around her. Her contact sheets reveal a zeal for the city. Sometimes she shot two or three frames on the same corner; usually, she moved around.

“A lot of these great shots, they’re just one-offs,” Mr. Goldstein, 54, said. “She captured the moment.”

All of the negatives were numbered and scanned, but he estimates there remains two to four months of work. Mr. Goldstein, a painter, shut down another business in May 2010 and has been working on the Maier collection full-time since then, along with his team.

“We’re all feeling a little depressed coming toward the end of the archive,” Mr. Goldstein said. “There’s a constant exploration.”

Mr. Jackowiak and Team Vivian felt the same way in October. “When it comes to the end and there’s no more to do, it’s like our fun has ended,” he said. “But it’s one of those things where, anytime Vivian comes up, somebody that’s worked on the project can say, ‘Hey, I worked on that.’ ”

Photographs from Jeff Goldstein’s Vivian Maier collection are on exhibit at Steven Kasher Gallery in New York until Feb. 25 and at Jackson Fine Art in Atlanta until April 7. Work from the collection will be featured in a book, “Vivian Maier: Private Journeys.”

Vivian Maier courtesy Jeffrey Goldstein

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