His death, several days after suffering a stroke, was announced by The Times, where he worked for nearly four decades.
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Bill Cunningham, the New York Times street-style photographer who for decades captured the fashions of everyday New Yorkers with the same zeal that he pursued celebrities and designers, died Saturday in New York.
Cunningham was known for his trademark blue jacket and riding a bicycle with a small camera bag strapped to his waist. Cunningham then worked a number of jobs including advertising, writing a freelance column for Women’s Wear Daily and served a stint in the U.S. Army before he got his first camera, the instrument that transformed his life. The New York Post first reported on Thursday that Cunningham was in the hospital recovering from a stroke – after faithful fans realized his weekly collection of photographs were missing from the pages of Sunday’s New York Times. In a 2002 interview with the paper, Cunningham said he always tried to be as discreet as possible because “you get more natural pictures that way”.
Cunningham worked for the New York Times for almost 40 years, operating “as a dedicated chronicler of fashion and as an unlikely cultural anthropologist”, the newspaper said.
“We all dress for Bill”, Vogue’s editor-in-chief Anna Wintour has said.
Over the years, Cunningham became a fixture himself. The film, which debuted to rave reviews, showed just how incredibly humble the photographer was, despite an iconic career in the industry that included a Legion d’Honneur in France and being named a Living Landmark by the New York Landmarks Conservancy.
In 2010, Cunningham was the subject of a documentary, Bill Cunningham New York, which offered a private look at his low-key, oft mysterious life behind the lens.
Perhaps this description from the Times’ obituary describes him best. He slept on a single-size cot, showered in a shared bathroom and, when he was asked why he spent years ripping up checks from magazines like Details (which he helped Annie Flanders launch in 1982), said: “Money’s the cheapest thing”.
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Tributes began to flood in as news of Cunningham’s death spread.
