The late photographer’s presence at an event told you it was worth attending
By RALPH GARDNER JR.
June 26, 2016 8:48 p.m. ET
As lovely as the Battery Conservancy gala on June 15 was—perfect weather, the SeaGlass Carousel taking guests for rides, the lawn of the newly restored Battery Oval resplendent—something was missing.
Bill Cunningham, the New York Times fashion photographer who annually dropped by to shoot the event, was absent. Mr. Cunningham died on Saturday after being hospitalized for a stroke.
His presence at a party, no matter how brief—arriving on his bicycle in his trademark blue smock jacket, shooting socialites and others (how he got all their names straight for captions I’ll never know) and then being on his way to the next event—was reassurance that your fundraiser rated, that among all the places you could be, or the things you could be doing in New York City on any given night, you were engaged in a spectacle of some importance.
There aren’t many New Yorkers whose loss resonates after they’re gone. But Bill Cunningham certainly will be among them.
You once knew an event was worth attending if Andy Warhol showed up. New York was a little more magical when it was possible to pass Jackie Onassis walking along Madison Avenue, or her son riding his bike through Tribeca. Or Brooke Astor alighting from a car in an impeccable suit and excellent jewelry to dispense philanthropy.
Mr. Cunningham bicycling to work in 2010. PHOTO: MARK LENNIHAN/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Bill Cunningham was part of that pantheon, and not just because he documented the lives of the rich and famous. He had become as recognizable as those he photographed. His talent was daily seeing the city through fresh eyes, finding beauty in both expected and unexpected places.
He seemed as smitten by hipsters and hip-hop artists as he as with the 1%.
I’ve sometimes thought about which is New York’s indispensable corner, the place where the city’s energy comes together. My conclusion was 57th Street and Fifth Avenue. I’m not sure whether it was also Mr. Cunningham’s favorite corner to shoot because he agreed. Or that I equate the city’s magic with that corner because Mr. Cunningham shot there. Chicken and egg. After a number of years the two became almost inseparable.
The part of “Bill Cunningham New York,” the wonderful 2010 documentary about his career that most remains with me, occurred when he received the French Legion of Honor. An ascetic who lived for many years above Carnegie Hall in a studio filled with file cabinets of his negatives, he takes the time out from shooting his own induction ceremony to shyly accept the award.
His voice breaking, he explains: “He who seeks beauty will find it.”That became understandable on one of the rare occasions when we spoke, since I didn’t find him the most easily approachable person. You quickly came to appreciate that the greatest favor you could do him wasn’t to distract him while he was working, to stay out of his way.
In my 20s, I was on a plane returning from Europe when I spotted a beautiful young woman several rows ahead of me. We made eye contact and I spent the rest of the journey trying, and failing, to get up the nerve to talk to her.
A few weeks later I was looking through the New York Times and saw her snapshot in Mr. Cunningham’s column, “On the Street.” Naively assuming the photographer got his subjects’ contact information, the next time I saw him I asked whether he might have hers.
He didn’t quite bite my head off. But he informed me that he’d have absolutely no idea who she was. He takes tons of pictures, then reviews them for fashion themes or patterns—color, style, cut, etc. The individual wearing the clothes, no matter how smitten I might have been, was secondary to him.
No doubt the Times will find someone else to shoot its society photos. It is also possible that readers coming along in the future unfamiliar with Mr. Cunningham’s work won’t know the difference.
But the photographer’s images weren’t simply shot. While I hate to use that overworked word, they were “curated.” They came with decades of institutional memory, the institutions being the world of fashion and New York City.
Part of his legacy may be that while life is ephemeral and while celebrities and socialites, even the most magnificent of them, come and go, they’re all making their individual contribution to something that Mr. Cunningham understood better than most: the passing parade and one of its capital cities.
— ralph.gardner@wsj.com