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Hundreds have gathered at Carnegie Hall in New York to pay tribute to the late photographer, Bill Cunningham, whose iconic bicycle and original French workman’s jacket took pride of place at centre stage
Credit: Instagram
At an at-capacity Carnegie Hall today in New York, hundreds gathered to pay their respects to the late New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham, who died four months ago at the age of 87 from complications caused by a stroke.
Those who paid tribute to the photographer include his niece; his Times colleagues with whom he created his weekly photographic columns; former mayor Michael Bloomberg; Condé Nast creative director Anna Wintour; and the New York Times publisher and chairman, Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr., all of whom delivered heartfelt tributes to the man who only four years earlier stood on the same stage as he was honoured by Carnegie Hall with its Medal of Excellence.
For six decades, Cunningham also lived in a rent-controlled artist’s space in Carnegie Hall. With no kitchen, Cunningham famously used a communal bathroom and slept on a single bed fashioned from plywood, as one memorialist noted, atop filing cabinets containing six decades of negatives documenting the city’s fashion, art, philanthropy and social scenes. In 2007, Cunningham has forced to vacate the space to make way for more rehearsal rooms, relocating to an apartment in Midtown, as was well documented in the brilliant 2010 documentary that made Cunningham a household name, Bill Cunningham New York.
The tribute was also attended by many working within the fashion industry, including iconic models Iman and Naomi Campbell, as well as fashion designers Ralph Lauren, Vera Wang, Michael Kors and Cynthia Rowley, and included a performance by the Canarsie Wobblers, dance troupe that specialise in the historical dances of the Jazz Age and the Swing Era.
Earlier this year, at the corner of Fifth Avenue and 57th Street, Mayor Bill de Blasio’s wife Chirlane McCray unveiled a commemorative street sign that paid tribute to the late milliner turned street photographer, whose work is largely credited with, as Mayor de Blasio put it, shaped the “city’s diversity in every sense of the word, and helped define New York as the fashion capital of the world.”
Cunningham is slated to receive another, more permanent memorial at a later date. You can stream the memorial here.
Tile and cover image: Instagram
