Bill Cunningham

With prescience, patience, and precision, New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham has captured the essence of street style and defined fashion trends through his work in New York and around the world since the late 1970s. A Harvard dropout and former milliner, Cunningham eventually settled on photography to express his love for fashion. He believed in the democracy of fashion early on, blurring the lines between classes and creating a groundbreaking vocabulary in his "On the Street" column in the Times. (Most recently, his story was captured in the documentary film Bill Cunningham New York). Cunningham crafts the story of a trend through countless hours of observation on the street every day, which he explains to readers alongside the week's selection of photographs every Sunday. These spontaneous, unpretentious photos capture the joys and humanity of urban life, locating the fantasy of fashion right on New York streets. His other feature for the Times, "Evening Hours", covers prestigious social events). He is known for being as tirelessly social as he is intensely private. Despite the rise of online media, Cunningham remains the authority on New York street fashion snapping everyone from Upper East Side swans and European royalty to street gangs, punks, downtown transvestites, bicycle messengers, and beyond.