Tens of Thousands of Stunning Images by Photographer Bill Cunningham Acquired by New York Historical

The museum will house photographs, negatives and slides belonging to the renowned photographer, who captured life in New York City for decades before his death in 2016

Christian Thorsberg | Daily Correspondent

August 1, 2025

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Beginning in the 1960s, photographer Bill Cunningham became famous for capturing New York City fashion, culture and candid street scenes. To honor his prolific presence among the city’s glitterati and everyday public, the New York Landmarks Conservancy even named him a “living landmark” in 2009.

But while he attended countless fashion shows and social events throughout his career, Cunningham was notoriously private about his life and work. As such, following his death in 2016 at the age of 87, the fate of his immense library of images, many of which have never been publicly shared, has remained uncertain—until now.

On July 25, the New York Historical announced it had acquired Cunningham’s archives, which include tens of thousands of photographs, negatives and slides.

“We are thrilled to have been chosen as the permanent home for the Bill Cunningham archive,” Louise Mirrer, president and CEO of the New York Historical, says in a statement. “Bill, who famously turned fashion photography into cultural anthropology, is unique among American chroniclers of social life in New York.”

For nearly 40 years Cunningham worked as a photographer for the New York Times, where he documented fashion and culture in his long-running “On the Street” and “Evening Hours” columns. In a 2010 documentary about Cunningham, Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour remarked, “I’ve said many times, ‘We all get dressed for Bill.’”

“Everything Bill did was such an important remnant of who he was, and what he represented to charities and people in the city,” Alexandra Lebenthal, one of Cunningham’s subjects, tells Women’s Wear Daily’s Rosemary Feitelberg. “I feel the archives have found their rightful resting place.”

Strutting | On the Street w/ Bill Cunningham | The New York Times

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Cunningham “could be stubbornly private, self-effacing and fiercely protective of his legacy,” writes the New York Times’ Ruth La Ferla. The photographer once turned down the opportunity to showcase his work at a career retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. At an event in 2014, he expressed his fears that “his images, not all of them flattering, would fall into improper hands,” reports the Times.

However, he donated 88 of his own silver gelatin prints to the New York Historical in 1976, and the museum displayed some of his work at an exhibition in 2014. Titled “Facades,” the show featured images of models in period costume posed in front of historic New York City buildings.

Two years after his death, the New York Historical held another exhibition that displayed his photography alongside items such as his jacket, bicycle, Valentine’s Day letters, cameras and hats that he created for his millinery line, William J., prior to his photography career.

“Cunningham was a beloved public figure who made New Yorkers rethink what is stylish or fashionable,” Debra Schmidt Bach, the museum’s former curator of decorative arts, told Artnet’s Sarah Cascone in 2018. “It is exciting to be able to share his personal effects with the public and, through the objects, offer a rare glimpse into the heart and mind of a New York legend.”

The archive spans roughly 600 linear feet, most of which are photographs taken between the 1960s and 2010s. But it also includes scrapbooks, news clippings and sketches from Cunningham’s time in Paris, where he covered fashion weeks and received the Legion of Honor from the French government in 2008.

According to the New York Historical, staffers are already working on an exhibition based on the archive’s materials.

Christian Thorsberg | Read More

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.