The intrepid octogenarian photojournalist Bill Cunningham. (Image by Georg Petschnigg.)

The great kottke.org pointed me in the direction of a cool-sounding forthcoming documentary by Richard Press called Bill Cunningham New York, which is set to open the New Director/New Films series at MoMA. Cunningham, an octogenarian style/street photographer for the New York Times, still gets around Manhattan on a Schwinn.

An excerpt from Cunningham’s reminiscences about how he ended up being a street photographer who focused on fashion, after having been everything from a waiter to a writer to a milliner to an Army recruit:

“After that, I went to work for The Chicago Tribune, for Eleanor Nangle. She had been there since the 1920’s. A wonderful woman. The best of the best. The Tribune had an office in New York, in the Times building. One night, in about 1966, the illustrator Antonio Lopez took me to dinner in London with a photographer named David Montgomery. I told him I wanted to take some pictures. When David came to New York a few months later, he brought a little camera, an Olympus Pen-D half-frame. It cost about $35. He said, ‘Here, use it like a notebook.’ And that was the real beginning.

I HAD just the most marvelous time with that camera. Everybody I saw I was able to record, and that’s what it’s all about. I realized that you didn’t know anything unless you photographed the shows and the street, to see how people interpreted what designers hoped they would buy. I realized that the street was the missing ingredient.”