William John " Bill " Cunningham Jr. (March 13, 1929 - June 25, 2016) is an American fashion photographer for The New York Times, known for his candid photography and the streets.
A Harvard University graduate, he was first known as a women's hat designer before moving on to write about fashion for Women's Wear Daily and Chicago Tribune. He began taking candid photographs on the streets of New York City, and his work became the New York Times's attention with Greta Garbo's capture in 1978 at an unattended time. Cunningham reported for papers from 1978 to 2016.
Cunningham was hospitalized for a stroke in New York City in June 2016, and died soon after.
Video Bill Cunningham (American photographer)
Early life and education
William John Cunningham Jr. born into an Irish Catholic family and raised in Boston. He never lost his Boston accent. He has two sisters and a brother. His parents were religious and used corporal punishment. She has her first exposure to the fashion world as a stockboy at Boston's Bonwit Teller Shop. He then said his interest in fashion began at church: "I can never concentrate on Sunday worship because I will concentrate on women's hats." After attending Harvard University on a two-month scholarship, he left in 1948 and moved to New York City at the age of 19, where he worked again at Bonwit Teller, this time in the advertising department. Not long after, he quit his job and attacked himself, making a hat with the name "William J". He was recruited during the Korean War and stationed in France, where he had his first exposure to French fashion. After serving a tour in the US Army, he returned to New York in 1953 and his work as a milliner. In 1958, a critic from the New York Times wrote that he had "cornered the framed face market with some of the most amazing cocktail hats ever imagined." He also works for Chez Ninon, a couture salon that sells design copies by Chanel, Givenchy, and Dior. His clients in 1950 included Marilyn Monroe, Katharine Hepburn, and First Lady Jacqueline Bouvier. Encouraged by his client, he began writing, first for Women's Wear Daily and then for Chicago Tribune . He closed his shop in 1962. After the assassination of President Kennedy in 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy sent Cunningham the red clothing Balenciaga he bought at Chez Ninon. He dipped it in black and he wore it to the cemetery.
Maps Bill Cunningham (American photographer)
Careers
Cunningham contributed greatly to fashion journalism, introducing American audiences to Azzedine AlaÃÆ'¯a and Jean Paul Gaultier. While working at the Women's Wear Daily and Chicago Tribune , she started taking fashion photos honestly on the streets of New York. He is a self-taught photographer. He took a photo like Greta Garbo, though he later said he did not recognize it when photographing his nutria coat: "I thought: 'Look at that shoulder piece. What I noticed was the mantle, and the shoulders. "
He then published a bunch of impromptu photos in the New York Times in December 1978, which soon became the regular series On the Street. The editor at Arthur Gelb called these photos "a turning point for the Times, because this is the first time the paper has taken good pictures-known people without getting permission them. "Cunningham remained joking about his role in the paper:" I just fluff, I fill around the ad, if we have one. " He pioneered newspaper coverage of the gay community, photographing a fundraising event at Fire Island Pines in 1979 allowing perceptive readers to interpret his photographs without verbal cues. In the 1990s, he integrated the benefits of AIDS, pride parade, and Wigstock into his coverage.
The most famous Cunningham columns at Times , On the Road and Curfew, ran in the paper from 26 February 1989 until just before his death in 2016. To On the Road , Cunningham photographed passersby and scenes on the streets of Manhattan, often on the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, the New York Times i> called "playful" Cunningham. When he works, the focus is on clothing as a personal expression. He does not photograph people in the paparazzi way, preferring a genuine personal style for celebrities. She once explained why she did not join a group of photographers who swarmed around Catherine Deneuve: "But she does not wear anything interesting." At the end of his life he explained: "I do not like taking pictures of women who borrow dresses, I prefer parties where women spend their own money and wear their own clothes.... When you spend your own money, you make different choices." Instead, Hilton Als wrote in The New Yorker , "He loves 'the kids,' he says, who wears their souls with sleeves he has never seen before, or in that way. He is not interested in those who show off their unfamiliar clothes, which they model on the red carpet at celebrity shows. Most of his photographs, he says, have never been published. The philosophy of fashion is populist and democratic:
Fashion is just as important and exciting today as ever. I know what people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they are horrified by what they see on the street. But mode does its job. It reflects our time.
He writes fashion critics and publishes photo essays on Details, beginning with six pages in his first edition in March 1985 and going on to more. He is also the owner of the magazine for some time. His work there includes a pictorial essay showing the similarity between Isaac Mizrahi's and Geoffrey Beene's previous designs, called Mizrahi "very unfair and arbitrary". In an essay in Details in 1989, Cunningham was the first to apply the word "deconstructionism" to fashion. Designer Oscar de la Renta said: "More than anyone in this city, he has the entire visual history of the last 40 or 50 years in New York.This is the total scope of fashion in New York life." She made a career of taking unexpected photographs of ordinary people, socialites and fashion personalities, many of whom appreciated her company. According to David Rockefeller, Brooke Astor requested that Cunningham attend his 100th birthday party, the only invited media member.
For eight years beginning in 1968, Cunningham built a vintage fashion collection and photographed Editta Sherman in vintage costumes using significant Manhattan buildings in the same period with background. Years later he explained, "We're going to collect all these beautiful dresses in thrift stores and on street shows.There's a picture of two 1860 tafeta dresses, a pre-Civil War-we pay $ 20 each. Nobody wants A CourrÃÆ'¨ I think it's $ 2. Kids get into hippie stuff, and I'm just crazy for all high fashion. "The project grew to 1,800 locations and 500 outfits. In 1978, he published Facade , a collection of 128 of these photos.
Exhibition
Photo selections from the Cunningham's series Facades Project were featured in the 1977 exhibition at Fashion Institute of Technology. The Facade series receives a full exhibition at the New-York Historical Society in 2014. The Society also holds 91 silver gelatin silver prints from the Facade series, donated by Cunningham, in their permanent collection. In 2016, Savannah College of Art and Design FASH Museum of Fashion Film presented "Grand Divertissement ÃÆ' Versailles, Vintage Photographs by Bill Cunningham," a Cunningham drawing exhibit on the Versailles Battle Show in 1973.
Awards and honors
In 1983, the American Fashion Designer Board named Cunningham as an outstanding photographer this year. In 2008 he was awarded the Officier de l'ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture. When he received the award at a ceremony in Paris, he photographed the audience and then told them: "It's really like today: anyone looking for beauty will find it." In 2009, he was named "a living landmark" by the New York Landmarks Conservancy. In 2012 he received the Carnegie Hall Medal of Excellence. The invitation to the award ceremony at the Waldorf Astoria reads "Come Dressed for Bill".
Personal philosophy
His personal philosophy is: "You see, if you do not take money, they can not tell you what to do, son." He sometimes says it another way: "Money is the cheapest thing, freedom is the most expensive." She rejected all the gifts from the people she photographed, even offering food and drinks at gala parties. He said: "I'm just trying to play straight, and in New York it's very... almost impossible. Be honest and straight in New York, it's like Don Quixote against a windmill." Although he contributed to the New York Times regularly beginning in the 1970s, he did not become an employee until 1994, when he decided he should have health insurance after being hit by a truck while biking. Most of the pictures were never sold or published. He said: "I'm really doing this for myself, I'm stealing people's shadows, so I do not feel guilty when I'm not selling them."
He worked on his own signature, dressed in a black sneaker uniform and a blue working jacket, the only accessory for the camera. He travels Manhattan on a bicycle, repeatedly replacing the stolen or damaged in an accident. He praised the city's bike-sharing program when it was launched in 2013: "There are bikes everywhere and it's perfect for New Yorkers who are always really impatient.What I love about them is seeing them all on wheels, on their way to work in the morning in their business suits, the women in their office attire... It has a very cute and very practical effect for New Yorkers... I mean, it's amazing. "After breaking the kneecap in a cycling accident in the year 2015, he wears a cast and uses a stick to photograph the gala of the Most Mozart Festival.
Cunningham describes his philosophy of fashion in the documentary film Bill Cunningham New York: "A wider world that regards fashion as a frivolity that must be eliminated in the face of social upheaval and enormous problems.- The point is that fashion, ah, you know, in fact it is armor to survive from the reality of everyday life.I do not think you can do it.It's like getting rid of civilization. "
In media
In 2010, filmmaker Richard Press and author Philip Gefter of The New York Times produced Bill Cunningham of New York a documentary about Cunningham. The film was released on March 16, 2011. It shows Cunningham traveling through Manhattan by bike and living in a small apartment in the Carnegie Hall building. The apartment does not have a closet, kitchen, or private bathroom, and is filled with filing cabinets and photographs. The documentary also explains his philosophy of fashion, art, and photography, and observes his interaction with his subject while taking photographs.
Cunningham is featured on BBC Two's The Culture Show in March 2012.
Death and inheritance
Cunningham died at the age of 87 in New York City on June 25, 2016, after being hospitalized for a stroke. His death was widely reported in both fashion and general press. After his death, department store Bergdorf Goodman created a look on his window that reminisced Cunningham. Thousands signed an online petition calling for corner 5th Avenue and 57th Street in New York City to be named "Bill Cunningham Corner". Cunningham is a lifelong Catholic and lifelong worshiper at St Thomas More Church in Manhattan, where the Personal Requiem Mass is celebrated by the parish priest, Father Kevin Madigan. Madigan recalled that "the hoses closest to him will prove that he is a spiritual person. From Sunday to Sunday Bill can be found in one of the back seats, as inconspicuous here as he will be in some gala at Met or Pierre or at grounding mode. "
Though known for his strong preference for personal privacy (he participated reluctantly as a documentary subject), Cunningham left the autobiographical script, which he named Climbing Mode, whose family found in his archive after his death in 2016. Penguin Press acquired the book at auction, to be published posthumously in September 2018. Critic Hilton Als has written the preface.
See also
- List of street photographers
Note
References
External links
- On the Road, Cunningham's weekly slideshow for New York Times online
- Tashjian, Rachel (June 25, 2016). "Bill Cunningham, Fashion Pioneer Street Photographer, Dies at 87". Vanity Fair . Retrieved June 25 2016 .
- Michallon, Clemence (June 25, 2016). "Legendary New York fashion and street photographer Bill Cunningham died at the age of 87". Daily Mail . Retrieved June 25 2016 .
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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