This was a pleasant documentary following the legendary Bill Cunningham. It gave a few details about his history and his personal life, but it mostly just showed Bill being Bill. What struck me about this movie was all of the dichotomies.
Bill Cunningham is the godfather of the street fashion photography. But it was clear in this movie that he’s still a man of the people. He’s still on the street every day. He does other things too, but his primary thing is taking pictures of clothes. He’s the ultimate recorder of the people, working for one of the biggest institutions. Meanwhile so many of the people he inspired started on free blogs taking pictures of the street and moved to a little fancy pictures of celebs and models, and writing books and only taking pictures of fancy people. Bill is the people’s street fashion photographer, even with the clout of the New York Times. Which stands in contrast to all of the street fashion photographers on the web, which use the people’s platform (i.e. internet) to be sort of elitist.
[Rambling, I had a point somewhere in there, but it fell apart pretty quickly.]