ABSTRACT
This chapter contrasts Christian Frei's Oscar-nominee documentary War Photographer (2001) on James Nachtwey and Richard Press's Bill Cunningham New York (2010) and Mark Bozek's The Times of Bill Cunningham (2018). These American photojournalists see themselves as documentarians and historians, capturing with their cameras human life, from the tragedy of conflict in Nachtwey's case to the creativity of fashion in Bill Cunningham's case. As men, they have in common their strong sense of privacy, their singlehood, and their use of the camera as a mask concealing their true personalities. The calm, sedate Nachtwey carries inside the weight of the horrors witnessed while photographing conflict; the smiling, affable Cunningham conceals a non-normative approach to sexuality and a gay activism that is both private and public. Blinded by the Romantic myth of the war photographer, Frei ignores the darker corners of Nachtwey's photographic work and the ethical issues raised by his professional exploitation of other people's lives. Press and Bozek need not face complex ethical issues, but they only manage to untangle the enigma that Cunningham was partially, missing to a great extent how his smile concealed a radical declassing and an attachment to femininity that only his posthumously published memoirs disclose.
