I’ve been trying to find something not too mawkish to say about the
photographer Bill Cunningham (op cit in this blog) who died on June 24, aged
87.
I loved his artfully artless photographs. He worked for The
New York Times for about 40 years, and was a cross between a street
photographer and a fashion photographer, snapping the fashionable people out in
public in Manhattan. He did some other
stuff as well, at parties and balls, but it’s the street stuff that matters.
Cunningham wasn’t one of the great New York walkers (he actually got
around by bike mostly) but he was certainly on foot when he took his
pictures. He was certainly a kind of
urban explorer, and probably an anthropologist, and maybe even a psychogeographer.
He may not have been looking for, in Debord’s terms, “zones of distinct psychic atmosphere” but he certainly knew where to go
to find people who were looking good and wearing fabulous clothes. And of course he often photographed them
while they were walking.
I never saw him when I lived in New York, but I know others who did,
some of whom wished he’d take their photograph, but he never did – and I know
some snappy dressers.
He seemed to have had the trick, and maybe we should
say gift, of appearing benign and good-natured when he photographed his
subjects. If he wanted to take your
picture then you didn’t feel threatened or maligned, you knew you looked
good. Compare and contrast with that
other great New York street photographer Bruce Gilden, who creates this effect:.
Even so I’m not sure there are many men who could get away with the
kind of thing that’s going on in the picture below:
If most of us tried to photography the feet and shoes of a bunch of
women standing on the street in Manhattan, I’m pretty sure the cops would be
called. I think you could probably talk
your way out of it, though I wouldn’t advise you to say you were a flaneur,
much less a psychogeographer.
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