When I was writing The Lost Art of Walking I interviewed a few “street photographers” including Martin Parr and Bruce Gilden. My simple theory being (simply) that street photographers take a lot of pictures of people walking, and in order to do that they themselves have to do a fair amount of walking too.
One photographer I wanted to interview but didn’t, was Bill Cunningham of the New York Times. Word on the street, i.e. a couple of people I knew at the New York Times, reckoned that even getting to speak to Bill Cunningham, or at least getting him to speak to me, could be a years long project in itself. They may have exaggerated, but Richard Press, the director of the documentary Bill Cunningham New York, says much the same. In the booklet accompanying the DVD (which I watched over the holidays) he says it took him 10 years to make the film: 2 years to shoot it, and before that 8 years to persuade Bill to be filmed.
Every Sunday the New York Time contains two features by Bill Cunningham. One is Evening Hours, and it’s pictures of New York “Society” people at various events and parties. The whole thing gives me the heebie-jeebies and I wish it were some kind of lacerating view of the vacuity of “Society,” but it just isn’t.
The other feature is titled On the Street, and consists of photographs of street fashions on the sidewalks of New York. The people here may be vacuous too I suppose, but the end result is wonderful. The whole project is obsessive and exhaustive and an act of supreme, sustained observation and visual collecting (maybe even that hideous word “curation”). One picture of a woman in leopardskin may not mean much; but 30 pictures of women in leopardskin that means plenty.
The documentary shows Cunningham on the street taking photographs (he generally favors photographing women rather than men, but not exclusively) and there’s nothing furtive about it. He just takes pictures, without permission in most cases as far as I can see, sometimes even chasing people down the street. Most of his subjects seem happy enough to be photographed: some of them in fact seem to be models, either professional or aspiring. One or two may look absurd in the photographs, but Bill Cunningham hasn’t made them look that way, they did it all by themselves.
Wathing the film it was hard not to be obliquely reminded of that recent video, made by Hollaback! “a nonprofit dedicated to ending street harassment” showing an actress being hassled as she walks on the streets of New York.
And I suppose Cunningham does harass some of his subjects. We all know the horror of the male photographic gaze. However, the documentary shows that he has enormous charm and warmth, and it probably helps that he’s such a benign and sweet looking old man. And age may have a lot to do with it. Certainly he’s the least threatening presence you could encounter on the streets of New York.
Cunningham alas is not a true flaneur since he rides from place to place on his bike, though he does plenty of walking when he gets “on site.” And these days he’s sufficiently well known that people take photographs of him as he’s working, maybe they even harass him. Yes – people walking on the street, take photographs of Bill Cunningham walking on the street, taking pictures of people walking on the street. I like that: I like that a lot.
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