Philip French 

Bill Cunningham New York – review

A portrait of New York fashion photographer Bill Cunningham is charming and witty, writes Philip French
  
  

bill cunningham
Bill Cunningham photographs women during New York fashion week 2010 in a scene from Bill Cunningham New York. Photograph: PR

Bill Cunningham is a dedicated photographer of fashion, now in his 80s, who lives in a small apartment attached to Carnegie Hall. For the past 50 years he's been cycling around Manhattan taking pictures for Women's Wear Daily, Details, and most prominently the New York Times, for which he provides two popular weekly columns, "On the Street" and "Evening Hours". The latter chronicles the rich as they go about their ostentatious work of dressing up to attend or organise charity events. The former, far more interestingly, observes the changing fashions of people as they walk the dramatic streets of New York sporting creations and combinations of their own. In his pictures and deportment Cunningham is like a Weegee of fashion, catching an ever-changing world on the wing. It's a charming, loving, witty portrait of the life and work of a delightful, kind man. He's a figure of probity in a corrupt, ruthless world of poseurs, mildly camp but essentially unaffected. Genuinely in love with clothes, Cunningham makes you think of fashion in a more positive and enlightened way.

 

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