He lived until 2010 in a studio above Carnegie Hall amid rows and rows of file cabinets, where he kept all of his negatives. He ate breakfast nearly every day at the Stage Star Deli on West 55th Street, where a cup of coffee and a sausage, egg and cheese could be had until very recently for less than $3.
He wanted to observe, rather than be observed. He wanted to find subjects, not be the subject. Yet Cunningham told nearly anyone who asked about it that the attendant publicity was a total hassle, a reason for strangers to approach and bother him. In 2010, a documentary film, “Bill Cunningham New York,” premiered at the Museum of Modern Art to glowing reviews. In 2009, he was named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy and profiled in The New Yorker, which described his columns On the Street and Evening Hours as the city’s unofficial yearbook, “an exuberant, sometimes retroactively embarrassing chronicle of the way we looked.” Back in New York, he was celebrated at Bergdorf Goodman, where a life-size mannequin of him, as slight and bony-thin as ever, was installed in the window.
In 2008, Cunningham went to Paris, where the French government bestowed him with the Legion d’Honneur. In the process, he turned into something of a celebrity himself. Up in Harlem, he jumped off his bicycle - he rode more than 30 over the years, replacing one after another as they were wrecked or stolen - for B-boys in low-slung jeans. Downtown, by the piers, he clicked away at crop-top wearing Voguers. In his nearly 40 years working for The Times, Cunningham operated both as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and as an unlikely cultural anthropologist, one who used the changing dress habits of the people he photographed to chart the broader shift away from formality and toward something more diffuse and individualistic.Īt the Pierre hotel on the East Side of Manhattan, he pointed his camera at tweed-wearing blue-blood New Yorkers with names like Rockefeller and Vanderbilt. His death was confirmed by The New York Times.
He had been hospitalized recently after having a stroke. Bill Cunningham, the street-style photographer whose photo essays for The New York Times memorialized trends ranging from fanny packs to Birkin bags, gingham shirts and fluorescent biker shorts, died Saturday in New York.
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