Died legendary fashion photographer – Journal News

Carolina Morais

Today at 14:27

Bill Cunningham, renowned fashion photographer of the “New York Times”, died on Saturday, following a stroke, aged 87. Know your history.

He was known for circular bike through the streets of New York, his city’s heart, to capture all those he passed. “I’m not interested in celebrities or his clothes,” he said in 2008. To him, it was the “people” that mattered. Bill Cunningham, legendary fashion photographer of the “New York Times”, died on Saturday in Manhattan, at 87. Was hospitalized following a stroke and ended up not resist.

In the nearly 40 years he worked for the US newspaper, Cunningham “captured the changing trends in dresses, the evolution of formality to something more diffuse and individualistic, “says” the Times “. “In the process, has become to himself a celebrity.”

It all started in 1948, when he gave at Harvard University to move to New York. He worked as a milliner and advertising, before being drafted into the army. A short time later he was back and began writing articles on fashion for the “Chicago Tribune”. It did not take long to discover that the picture was in fact his real passion and he devoted himself to observe and capture New Yorkers, for hours before, in 1978, start doing it for the “New York Times. “

” in a way, I am a keeper of memories. More than a collector, “he acknowledged in an interview. In 2008, the renowned photographer traveled to Paris, France, where he was decorated by the French government with the title of Knight of Arts and Letters. Two years later, he had the right to his own documentary, “Bill Cunningham New York,” which premiered at the Modern Art Museum of the Big Apple.

Almost no one is indifferent to his legacy. As stressed Anna Wintour, director of “Vogue” magazine, in the 2009 documentary: “We all dress for Bill.” In the last hours, several journalists, models, stylists and photographers, among others, have left tribute messages to his life and work in social networks. “See a street image of Bill Cunningham was to see entire New York,” says the executive editor of “The Times,” Dean Basquet, a “post” Twitter.

But Bill Cunningham liked was to look for others, and not that they look for you. “I went to the movies. I had no TV. I ate breakfast every day in Stage Star Deli, on 55th Street, which called for a cup of coffee, a sausage, egg and cheese for less than three dollars. He lived until 2010 a studio above Carnegie Hall, among queues and file cabinets queues, where he kept all his negatives. He slept in a narrow bed, took a shower in a shared bathroom and when asked why he spent years refusing checks magazines , say ‘money is the cheapest thing. Freedom is the most expensive,’ “reads the obituary of the” New York Times “.

He was 87 years and throughout life, passed through major transformations of photography and fashion. What fascinated him, then, in this world? “Fashion is so vital and so interesting today as it ever was. I know that people with a more formal attitude mean when they say they feel horrified by the things that come on the street. But fashion is doing its job. You to reflect, accurately, our times, “he explained in an essay written in 2002.