JoeGoaUK,
You gotta be thick-skinned to be a great street photographer. Perhaps
this story will inspire you.
Over the years Mr Cunningham has lived through 27 bikes being stolen
(his only form of transportation), being hit by vehicles making illegal
turns, being thrown out of receptions he has been invited to, and having
his work stolen and re published with captions changed deliberately
insult subjects.
Bill is still shooting. He has survived all the cutbacks at the NyTimes.
France has him an Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters
Look up his column on the NYTimes website. Keep up your good work.
Albert Peres
afpe...@3129.ca
416.660.0847 cell
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http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfrJpaTuhhI
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Cunningham_%28photographer%29
Article below:
http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/03/16/movies/bill-cunningham-new-york-fashion-photographer-review.html
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Movie Review
Bill Cunningham New York (2010)
NYT Critics' PickThis movie has been designated a Critics' Pick by the
film reviewers of The New York Times.
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Richard Press's documentary “Bill Cunningham New York.”
Capturing a ‘Look at Me’ Milieu With Impish Modesty
By CARINA CHOCANO
Published: March 15, 2011
Later in the film, however, Kim Hastreiter, the co-editor of Paper
magazine and a frequent subject of Mr. Cunningham’s, makes the same
observation. “He’ll do anything for the shot,” she says, as he runs into
the street to get in front of a young woman in a sequined sheath. “I’ve
been in deep conversations with him where he’ll just run from me because
he sees someone.”
By this point in “Bill Cunningham New York,” Richard Press’s captivating
and moving portrait of a singular man and a passing era, it’s possible
to view what Mr. Cunningham does as the flip side of war photography,
and not entirely unrelated. He seeks out and captures humanity amid the
maelstrom of life, looking for what Harold Koda, chief curator at the
Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, describes in the
film as “ordinary people going about their lives, dressed in fascinating
ways.” In these fleeting and otherwise unseen or unremarked moments, Mr.
Cunningham finds something creative, life-affirming and free, and
preserves it forever.
The film goes about its business just as its subject does — quietly,
modestly, almost invisibly. Mr. Press, along with Philip Gefter, the
producer, and the cinematographer Tony Cenicola (a staff photographer
for The Times) followed Mr. Cunningham around New York for two years,
with no crew, tagging along to charity events and runway shows. They
visited him in the lost-in-time world of the Carnegie Hall studios,
where Mr. Cunningham and the 98-year-old photographer Editta Sherman,
the last two residents on their floor, faced eviction after decades.
Interspersing lively insights from Mr. Cunningham with affectionate
stories from longtime friends and subjects — socialites, editors,
models, eccentrics, dandies, avant-gardists, curators and neighbors —
Mr. Press has created an intimate portrait that feels more found or
captured than it does constructed.
To pay attention to Mr. Cunningham’s work, especially since his “On the
Street” column became a multimedia slide show featuring his seemingly
improvised commentary, is to sense that something sets him apart, that
his work is animated not only by a refined eye but also by a worldview.
With his raspy Yankee drawl, he sounds like Katharine Hepburn’s bon
vivant cousin. But in one of the many contradictions that define him,
his life is one of monastic solitude and simplicity.
He owns what look to be roughly five articles of clothing. (His
signature piece is the same royal blue workman’s jacket worn by Parisian
street sweepers, which sells for about $20 and comes in a plastic bag.)
He favors $3 lunches. Until he moved, when Carnegie Hall reclaimed the
artists’ residences there for other uses, he lived in a tiny studio with
no kitchen and with a bathroom down the hall. He gets around on an old
bicycle and sleeps on a cot surrounded by filing cabinets containing
every negative of every shot he has ever taken. And yet somehow the
patrician image is further burnished by the radical lifestyle. He’s an
aesthete and an ascetic, a member of the establishment and a bohemian,
and among the last of his kind.
In an essay in The New York Review of Books shortly after J. D.
Salinger’s death, Michael Greenberg described Salinger’s characters as
being what Tolstoy called “aristocrats of the spirit” whose “quest is
for an almost impossible purity that drives them away from the workaday
world, toward a dangerous, self-burying seclusion.” Mr. Cunningham could
easily be the eighth Glass sibling, and the other seven would be glad to
have him. He loves taking pictures of people in the rain because they
“forget about you,” he says. “If they see you, they don’t go putting on
airs, people are who they are.” When France names him an officer of the
Order of Arts and Letters, he spends the time up to when he is about to
receive the award snapping photos of the guests in attendance.
If the film suggests that there’s something bittersweet about a life
dedicated to a single pursuit cultivated with an almost religious
fervor, it also stands in awe of its subject’s seemingly inexhaustible,
self-abnegating capacity to remain attuned to the expression of others.
“I’ve said many times that we all get dressed for Bill,” Anna Wintour,
editor in chief of American Vogue, says in the film.
By staying at a distance from the objects of his obsession, Mr.
Cunningham has molded himself into the designated noticer and
interpreter of the city, a kind of Lorax of New York fashion.
“I don’t decide anything,” he says. “I let the street speak to me, and
in order for the street to speak to you, you’ve got to stay out there
and see what it is.”
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