Bill Cunningham: On the Street

PREFACE

by TIINA LOITE, former photography editor, The New York Times Styles section

Bill Cunningham was a photographer, yet he always liked to insist he wasn t. I m not a real photographer, he would say. I m a columnist who writes with pictures.

I knew and worked with Bill for more than thirty years as a photo editor at The New York Times. When I was asked to select and organize his work for this book, I did not kid myself about what that would involve. Bill worked seemingly around the clock, virtually every day of the year. My rough guess was that the number of photographs to research would equal the number on the national debt clock. As it turned out, I was pretty close.

I began in familiar territory, with the tens of thousands of pictures Bill took for The Times, starting in the 1970s. This process was painstaking, months-long, and made more difficult by the paper s database, which the years, moves, and human foibles had left incomplete. But to gain a full understanding of Bill s range, it was important to look carefully at as many of the photos as were accessible, both those that had been published and those that had not.

And then there was Bill s own personal archive, which is the fashion world s equivalent of King Tut s tomb. He kept this massive trove in his apartment, and after he died, it was transferred under the care of his niece, Trish Simonson, to an art-storage facility in Rockland County, just north of New York City. There, file cabinets and boxes so numerous that forklifts are required to transfer them to a hangarlike room for viewing overflow with prints, negatives, contact sheets, correspondence, clippings, notebooks, and more. Some drawers are so packed with files that they are nearly impenetrable.

What struck me most while searching through this remarkable material was that Bill was a man who absolutely loved his job. Was

Bill Cunningham was an American fashion icon and photographer for The New York Times from 1978 to 2016, known for his candid and street photography. Before capturing the Times s attention with a candid of Greta Garbo, Bill was a designer of women s hats, then a fashion writer for Women s Wear Daily and the Chicago Tribune.

Bill Cunningham: On the Street is the work of a great anthropologist and fashion genius. Through his skilled eyes and his camera lens, he chronicled a half-century of fashion, capturing the high road, as well as the man or woman, in the fashion parade of daily life. This book is a dazzling kaleidoscope from the gaze of an artist who saw beauty at every turn. André Leon Talley, Vogue contributing editor

On the Street helps fill the void left by Bill s absence. His voice and his vision are very much alive on these pages, and the pictures and words are possibly even more potent the second time around. Remarkably, even though Bill s images meticulously and wittily document fashion trends, the photographs never seem dated.  We have in this book the New York we want to believe in, a magical metropolis where every resident, of every species, and even the flowers blooming in the park, have bewitching style. With this survey of his work, organized both chronologically and thematically, we finally see ourselves as Bill saw us as a proud and restless tribe of exhibitionist-voyeurs. Amy Fine Collins, Vanity Fair special correspondent

This book is so inspiring, not only for the incredible fashion and images that Bill captured, but also for celebrating his decades-long commitment to the genre of street style. Scott Schuman, The Sartorialist

The history of fashion is actually the history of fashion photography, and in that respect, Bill Cunningham is our Herodotus. Judith Thurman, staff writer and cultural critic at The New Yorker

Pure joy and an absolute must for fashion lovers and Cunningham fans. Booklist (starred review)