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Bill Cunningham did not operate the same way other Times photographers did. He marched to his own drummer, which made gathering and sorting through images for a new book covering five decades of his iconic photography a wild and difficult odyssey.
I worked with this remarkable man for more than two of those decades, on what began as Styles of the Times and is now Sunday Styles — and I was friends with him for even longer.
Bill was his own editor and was unique among our photographers in that he had two columns in The Times every week, each of which contained a large number of photographs.
His print photography of the ’70s, ’80s and early ’90s was well organized in our photo morgue, though it seems only half the prints from those “On the Street” columns were retained. Information was attached to the back of each photo, and Bill scribbled notes there as well.
When the Times photo staff started using digital cameras, Bill held on to his film camera. His film was scanned into our photo database, and he used paper printouts of his photographs in creating his layouts.
Unlike other Times photographers, Bill did not get a daily assignment number, necessary for archiving and searching for images. Nor did he write captions for what he shot. He dictated his copy for the Street column to an editor on the copy desk. In the early digital years, there were indexers who would copy and paste Bill’s published writing onto the Street photos, but eventually those jobs disappeared. Bill’s pictures poured into our database with no information on them other than his name.
Then there were “black hole” years, when his photos ended up in the database with gibberish on them. Someone created a template to make things easier for captioning, but it wasn’t used properly. Hundreds of photos just have the template on them, over and over again.
Large chunks of Bill’s work simply could not be found.
When I was going through the files for 2009, I was unable to find his photos from Barack Obama’s inauguration. (Bill went down to Washington for the day and devoted his column to it.) This material would have been completely lost had it not been for the Times archivist Jeffrey Roth, who just happened to have saved a few boxes of seemingly unnecessary paper printouts of Bill’s photos from 2009 and a few other years. It was one of those “I’ve been meaning to throw these out …” kind of things.
I looked through one of the boxes and, astoundingly, unearthed printouts of the inauguration photos. The printouts led me, via a tortuous back-roads path, to the digital files. As it turned out, not even Bill’s name was on many hundreds of his images. I would go on to find other must-have images in those boxes as well.
Bill took a lot of photographs. He was on the street every day of every week of every year, so there was a ridiculous amount of material, even taking into consideration how much was missing.
Once I finished going through the work from each decade and making an edit, the next step was to find the negatives and get many of the photographs re-scanned at higher resolutions.
This brings me to Bill’s archive, the repository for everything that is Bill Cunningham.
We wanted to include some of Bill’s pre-Times photography. The word “some” proved to be laughable.
The archive is jaw-droppingly treasure-filled in terms of fashion history, with more photos than this book could possibly feature. Bill’s work — prints, negatives and an assortment of papers and clippings once all housed in his small apartment — is squirreled away in big old file cabinets and battered boxes in an art storage facility in Rockland County.
Besides being the repository of “some” early material, the archive was also the place to hunt for the large number of specific negatives I needed to re-scan for the book. This was not something I could do by myself, given the enormous volume of images and the slow pace needed to accomplish this task.
On each of the search days, I had a team of able and determined helpers, including Bill’s niece, Trish Simonson, who is the keeper of Bill’s estate. Armed with printouts of the photos and with portable light boxes on which to pore over negatives, we set to work.
This turned out to be one of the most difficult aspects of the project. Bill’s Street columns featured photos that might have been shot a week or two before publication, but they sometimes also included images taken weeks, even months, prior. So I might be looking for a photo from an August column when the negative in question resided in a folder from July, June or May, but I wouldn’t know that until I went through every negative in the August folder.
Did I mention that most of these folders — by which I mean used FedEx or 8×10 envelopes Bill had fished out of the trash and repurposed — contained anywhere from 50 to 150 sheets of negatives?
We all hated the December folders: Bill always shot more during the holidays, so those were particularly fat.
To make things even harder, Bill’s early work from the ’70s was mostly shot with a half-frame camera. This meant that there were 72 tiny frames per roll instead of 36. These negatives took much longer to look through and required more concentration (and caused a lot of headaches).
But there was much more magic than vexation in my photo search. As I looked through sheet after sheet of negatives, I was able to see what Bill saw. All those people coming and going, each wearing something Bill deemed interesting.
The vast majority of the time, there were only one or two frames of a person. Other times he would stealthily stalk someone, trying to get a good angle on whatever it was he wanted to show his readers, while remaining unobserved himself.
Then there were the people who were trying to be photographed, making eye contact with a small “I know who you are” smile on their faces or a “please take my picture” plea in their eyes. Some people knew exactly what Bill was after and put their foot forward or held their handbag aloft or tilted their hat-topped head just so.
I honestly could not get enough of this.
In the hunt for specific images, I inevitably found a lot more photographs I hadn’t been looking for. How could I not? I was swimming in negatives. I was like a child in one of those Gymboree ball pits, surrounded on all sides by pictures that Bill had taken that everyone needed to see.
I narrowed my sights to frames Bill had marked with a grease pencil as being of interest to him. But Bill marked a lot of photos. If he didn’t use them one week, he would use them another.
By ending each search day with far more images than I had set out to find, I was making my editing job more complicated, and unloading way too many images on our book designer, Jen Wang from Clarkson Potter. There was never a trip to the archive where I didn’t come back with exciting finds, even during the last visit or two when time was of the essence and Jen had told me “no more.”
That’s when I found the shot of the dog in the mink coat. “We HAVE to have the dog in the mink coat. It will be the last thing we swap in, I swear.” I lied.
Some photos we never found. We often saw frames that made us believe we were on the right track, but then a negative strip would be missing — undoubtedly the one containing the sought-after shot. Bill had probably taken the strip to make a print for someone who was in one of the photos, and neglected to put it back.
Sometimes I was in a snit over not finding something, only to have someone yell that they had found it while searching for something else. There were many photographs on my “Wanted” list. One particular shot was finally discovered in a folder of negatives taken an entire year before the photo ran. You see, Bill knew where everything was. He knew that a photo he needed for completing one column had been shot and filed away a year earlier for another.
Along with negatives, Bill’s folders also contained whatever notes or clippings might pertain to that column’s theme or event. There were phone messages on slips of paper from old “While you were out” notepads. There were newspaper clippings about people who were in the column. There were thank you notes from these same people.
From his early days as a fashion writer, through his entire career as a photographer, Bill kept virtually every scrap of paper. The more time I spent in his archive, the more I got the sense he wasn’t doing this for himself. It was for those who would one day be looking at his work. As we all know, the history of Bill Cunningham is the history of fashion.
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