On Thursday evening in New York, friends, family and members of the fashion crowd gathered at the Lincoln Center Theater to watch a new film about the legendary photographer and style historian — their comrade Bill Cunningham.
“The Times of Bill Cunningham,” by director Mark Bozek and narrated by Sarah Jessica Parker, features an interview Bozek conducted with Cunningham in 1994 — one the photographer insisted would only take “10 minutes” but ended up going for hours. Bozek had been sitting on the footage for years, until he got in touch with Cunningham’s niece Trish Simonson. He traveled to Orangeburg, N.Y., to the Holiday Inn there, where he showed Simonson the interview via his laptop.
“Trish didn’t know [about her uncle’s involvement in] this fashion world at all. Bill kept his family completely separate from it. When they asked him his life, he sort of didn’t talk about it,” Bozek explained. “When I showed her the film, she heard her uncle like she’s never heard him talk in her life. She was really emotional, and so was I.
“And I thought, gosh, if that’s the first step, she would then bless it.”
Bless it she did. She gave Bozek access to Cunningham’s archives — a treasure trove of photographs, letters and negatives that provided context for the stories the photographer verbally shared with Bozek during the interview.
“I had his words, and he told me his whole life, but getting access to the pictures was game-changing,” Bozek said, adding that he found many other surprises in the archives — including pictures of the very first Pride Parade, which Cunningham covered every year thereafter and never published.
Iman attended the screening, along with Susan Rockefeller — one of the executive producers of the movie — the designer Stephen Burrows, Pat Cleveland and stylist Freddie Leiba. For the after party, they trooped over to Shun Lee restaurant down the street, where they traded memories and stories about Bill while eating dim sum and drinking wine.
“He was very respectful of everybody,” Iman said. “He asked you — he didn’t just get in your face. He was not interested in you posing, he wanted to capture the essence of you. That’s why he was so good at capturing street fashion. Whether you were a socialite, or a club kid — it was the same ground. Because ultimately, it was about style.”
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