Iconic fashion photographer Bill Cunningham dead at 87

Cunningham worked for the New York Times for about 40 years, operating “as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and an unlikely cultural anthropologist,” the daily said. 

His photo spreads were a staple of the paper’s Style section and chronicled changing fashion through his choice of themes such as swirling skirts, Birkin bags and gaudy floral prints. “A lot of people complain about fashion and fast fashion. There is no fashion. That is baloney. Look at this,” he said in a video for a recent spread in the paper on the use of black and white contrasts in clothing. 

Cunningham took pictures of celebrated New Yorkers at swank events and travelled the city by bicycle for decades, often wearing his signature blue jacket, to shoot street fashion typically using a single-lens reflex camera. “He wanted to find subjects, not be the subject. He wanted to observe, rather than be observed. Asceticism was a hallmark of his brand,” the newspaper said. Cunningham, who had tried his hand at hat making, was drafted by the US Army during the Korean War. After he got out in 1953, he eventually found work as a fashion reporter. 

In the mid-1960s he acquired a small camera to help him with his work, and that started him off in fashion photography. “I had just the most marvellous time with that camera. Everybody I saw I was able to record,” he wrote in the Times in 2002. In 2008, the French government awarded him the Legion d’Honneur for his work. 

A year later, he was named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. His life was one of austerity. He slept on a single size cot where he lived until 2010 in a studio above Carnegie Hall, chock full of file cabinets containing his negatives.