Non-Fiction Wednesday - More Than Words

art by Sarah S. Brannen

           Visit Alyson Beecher on Wednesdays for Non-Fiction Picture Books at Kidlit Frenzy.  From her post and others, you will discover and want to celebrate terrific nonfiction picture books! 

                

          Having just read Photographic: The Life of Graciela Iturbide it feels like serendipity that this book would be my next non-fiction share, the story of an especially well-known man in New York City, a picture-book story of fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, someone I've never heard of but evidently most New Yorkers have.

         Children’s author Deborah Blumenthal writes a tribute for one of New York’s most beloved and slightly eccentric fashion icons. He evidently was recognizable with his “blue French worker’s jacket, tan pants, and black sneakers” and a camera “slung around his neck,” for decades. He did not wish to be recognized and he kept a low profile when he could in order to find the beauty in "street fashion" he thought surrounded everyone in this city. He shared a New York Times photo column “like squares on a story quilt.” The watercolors by Masha D'yans fill the pages with Bill's working hours, full of those he saw as beautiful. 

 An author’s note and bibliography is at the back. Here are some pages from the book. Be sure to enlarge to read the text that gives a taste of how Bill Cunningham saw the world. That last picture shows the file cabinets filled with the thousands of pictures he took, a history of New York City's people we would never have seen without him.