The Thousands

Over two years, Richard Press tracked the life and work of an impish, bike-riding, octogenarian photographer whose “On the Street” column is a New York Times fixture. If there’s such a thing as a fashion monk, Bill Cunningham is it. Equally at ease with street toughs and society elites, he utterly rejects egotism and luxury, and has subsumed his personal life to an almost anthropological delight in capturing how people dress. Press guides us into Cunningham’s enigmatic, ascetic world delicately and unobtrusively. He explains a personal philosophy that blends ethics and pragmatism, from repairing a rain poncho with gaffer tape to refusing money and perks in favour of intellectual independence.

Cunningham is the product of a vanished America – his diction is a charming hybrid of Noo-Yawk squawk and Katharine Hepburn Anglo vowels. Yet unlike fellow photographer Editta Sherman, his neighbour in the now-demolished artists’ studios above Carnegie Hall, Cunningham isn’t petrified by nostalgia. He just gets on his bike and swooshes away, hungry for the next sartorial revelation. With his keen eye and memory for motifs, his observations transcend the banality of ‘trends’. No wonder the fashion world regards him as a treasure.