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.
