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Style hound: on the street with Bill Cunningham - fashion photographer
ArtForum, March, 1996 by Guy Trebay
If you live in Manhattan, you cannot have failed to see him, a narrow-shouldered and youthful-looking man of 60 riding his ancient bicycle, or perched at street corners or at the 26th Street flea market, or hovering at a society party in the Temple of Dendur, or kneeling at the runway of the fashion shows that he has covered for almost thirty years. You cannot have failed to see him darting along 42nd Street, halting passersby whose items of clothing seem to him to reveal something about fashion as it's being formulated moment by moment, a girl with some crazy kind of hair extensions, one of the Chanel addicts of 57th Street, a member of the evergrowing Prada gang. "Hiya, muffin," Bill Cunningham says to his subjects, clicking as he goes.
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The images of style Bill Cunningham publishes each Sunday in the New York Times are static and largely artless. Yet the people in his pictures are so engaged in imagining themselves being fashionable that the images are only partly about clothes. They are also about pretension and vanity and human frailty; still, they are optimistic pictures. They accumulate power through repetition and the photographer's regard for detail and a method that never diverges from formula. The formula is this: stand still and watch the passing parade.
Cunningham shoots in sharp focus, in profile or straight on. He makes pictures that are clearly focused, unimaginative, because he wants to direct the viewer's attention anywhere but to the person behind the lens. if he has, in any intentional way, set out to compile a thorough document of a certain group of people at the end of the century, as some think, you would never know it from his words. if he thinks of himself for one minute as the Eugine Atget of the fashionable world, you'll never get him to say as much.
"If the pictures have any distinction," Cunningham told the Fashion Group international when he received an award from the organization a few years back, "it's because of the subject, not the photographer." Or, as he more bluntly put it in a New York magazine profile in 1990, "I'm nothing." This "nothingness" is, most likely, just a craftsman's practiced transparency, a way to create distance from, and maybe even mildly to rebuke, the culture of celebrity. You cannot get him to admit that, either. "One of Bill's favorite sayings, when anyone starts taking the fashion scene too seriously," explains Visionaire editor Stephen Gan, a friend of the photographer, "is 'Oops, you're falling into the traps of the rich.'" One way Cunningham has avoided failing into those traps is by barricading himself behind a working method that is stringent and distanced and scrupulous. There is little chance that future esthetes will find themselves poring over Cunningham's oeuvre, but archivists and cultural historians will probably bless his name.
Who is he? Who is this man on the street with a newsboy's cap turned backward, a man who resembles Franklin Pangborn, the slightly fruity floorwalker from '30s movies, the m;n invariably at the front row of both major and obscure fashion shows, wearing a blue utility jacket that makes him look as if he works in a florist shop? How is it that he knows everyone?
The biography is sketchy, but this much, at least, is known. Bill Cunningham was born outside of Boston to a Catholic family about six decades ago, photographed his first fashion show in 1947, worked as a stock boy in a Boston department store and later at Bonwit's, served in the Army, and, when he got out, immediately began making "muffs, hats, masks, furniture and decorative items" of feathers. He signed them on broadcloth ribbons with the name William J. "I haven't seen feathers worked this way since before the War in Paris," Ruth Jacobs, the superannuated fashion editor of Women's Wear Daily, was said to have remarked when a messenger brought several models for her approval. "Interview William J.," she instructed Bernadine Morris, then a reporter on her staff. "Can you tell me where I can find William J.?" Morris asked the messenger. "I am William J.," he replied.
For a time in the early '60s, Cunningham ran a shop in a small frame building on Job's Lane in Southampton, Long Island, in the window of which he placed a single straw sun hat the size of a beach umbrella. He lived in the back of the shop and cooked on a hot plate and slept in a camp bed and hung what there was of his wardrobe over the closet door. "He had one pair of clean khakis and one shirt and one pair of underwear on a hanger," says Morris, who became one of Cunningham's closest friends. "The other outfit he wore." By 1963, Cunningham had abandoned the millinery business and was hired as a reporter for Women's Wear Daily. He coined impious turns of phrase to describe the fashionable ("Arrogant Elegance!") and was fired after only nine months. Next he freelanced as a fashion correspondent for the Chicago Tribune, where the perks included annual trips to cover European couture. From there he went on to other freelance jobs, with both uptown and downtown magazines and newspapers, including a productive stint with the pre-condc, Nast Details, a pioneer in its coverage of demimonde fashion in the '80s. Cunningham became known for his encyclopedic chronicling of the fashion shows in his soreads for Details, which culminated ina 101-page feature for the magazine in March 1991. There are two versions of how Cunningham first came to pick up a camera. In one, British photographer Harold Chapman, working for the New York Times in Paris, suggested to him that it would be easier to take pictures of fashion than to make his usual elaborate notes. In another story, the fashion illustrator Antonio Lopez gave Cunningham the first camera he had owned since a boyhood Brownie. In any case, the apparatus unexpectedly provided for Cunningham a means to put his eye and memory and doggedness and appetite for fashion to its best possible use. "The way nuns take vows of poverty or chastity, Bill took a vow of fashion," Lopez once told me. In the brief speech Cunningham gave to the Fashion Group International, the photographer revealed something of the appetites masked by his studied meekness when he spoke of "a roaring passion . . . unleashed to document everything I had known, seen and dreamed of in fashion."
