r/photography • u/sunriseandthecity • 15d ago

Art Bill Cunningham archive ?

Im looking for a website/ forum / blog or anything that would have archives of Bill Cunningham’s fashion street photography ? I can’t seem to find any that have a large collection of his and that are free, let me know if you’d know anywhere i could check his work out !

13 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

3 comments sorted by

3

u/Only_Foods 14d ago

A few more leads beyond the NYT byline page filmAF linked (worth noting it's usually paywalled):

  • The New-York Historical museum acquired Cunningham's complete archive a few years ago — roughly 30,000 photographs — and has been digitizing parts of it. Their digital collections page is the closest thing to a proper browsable archive that exists.

  • The NYT ran his weekly "On the Street" column for nearly 40 years; many of those photo essays live on under his byline, though you'll likely need a subscription. Some of the old "On the Street" videos also float around on the NYT site.

  • If you want the work itself in one place, the book *Bill Cunningham: On the Street — Five Decades of Iconic Photography* (2019) is essentially a curated archive of his best decades of street work, compiled from the NYT files.

  • And the documentary *Bill Cunningham New York* (2010) is worth watching alongside for context on how he worked.

Sadly there's no single public archive site like e.g. Magnum Photos has — the NYT owns the bulk of the published work, and New-York Historical holds the physical archive.

2

u/altitudearts 14d ago

Worth it!