During his lifetime, Bill Cunningham, inveterate chronicler of fashion high and low who traveled the city by bike in his signature blue jacket, was notably reluctant to share with the public his vast storehouse of photographic images. He once remarked, only half in jest, that he would sooner see it burn.
So one may well wonder what Cunningham, the New York Times photographer who died in 2016 at age 87, would have made of the news that the New York Historical has acquired his archive, giving a permanent home to his tens of thousands of photographs, negatives, slides, contact sheets and memorabilia, putting an end to years of speculation about the fate of his work.
The collection had been managed by Patricia Simonson, Cunningham’s niece and co-executor, and had for years been stored in rows of files and boxes in the photographer’s studio above Carnegie Hall. It will reside in the Tang Wing for American Democracy, set to open next year, and be available to generations of researchers and scholars.
Louise Mirrer, the president of the New York Historical, was struck by the variety of the collection. “Bill turned fashion into cultural anthropology,” she said. “He found the pulse of the city in every nook and cranny, photographing the glitzy, the wealthy, the crème de la crème, and making stops on his bicycle along the way to photograph other things that intrigued him, the grunge scene or a party downtown.”
She added, “That is a kind of history of New York City that does not exist anywhere else.”
Simonson, whom Cunningham had charged with the care of his estate, which was valued at $1 million, according to a filing in Manhattan Surrogate's Court, explained her choice of a resting place for the archive: “My feeling was that now, coming up on nine years since Bill’s death, it was time to find a suitable home, a place that would digitize his work and make it available to people.”
She viewed New York Historical as ideal, she said, situated, as it is, “right on Central Park West in Manhattan, where much of his work took place.”
For a public figure — he was designated a living landmark in 2009 by the New York Landmarks Conservancy— Cunningham could be stubbornly private, self-effacing, and fiercely protective of his legacy. He declined a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, telling Harold Koda, then the curator of the Museum’s Costume Institute, that “it would have been a diversion” from his job.
As he told Fern Mallis, a prominent fashion and design consultant who asked about his legacy in a 2014 interview at the 92nd Street Y, “Who thinks about a legacy? I’m a worker in a factory. All we think about there is what we’re doing today.”
He went on to say that he was thinking of tossing his life’s work into the fire. As he explained, it wasn’t modesty that troubled him, but a terror (his word) that his images, not all of them flattering, would fall into improper hands.
He may well himself have come to regard New York Historical as a fitting showcase, Mirrer suggested. Some years ago, he donated a portion of his memorabilia there. An exhibition, “Facades,” in 2014, of Cunningham’s photo essay capturing models in period costumes posed against historic settings, was based on those materials, she said. “I really do think Bill would see this as home.”
The museum plans to exhibit Cunningham’s “Evening Hours” — his widely popular New York Times photographs documenting the city’s charitable galas and philanthropic events — late this year. The show, Mirrer said, will be a prelude to a more expansive future exhibition of the photographer’s work in the new wing.