The first is Bill on Bill, where the photographer recalls how he … At the beginning of his career, Cunningham took a picture of Greta Garbo without knowing he was the famous lonely and shy movie star. (I love Cunningham’s On the Street dispatches.) William J. Cunningham (born 1929) is a fashion photographer for The New York Times, ... As the result of a chance photograph of Greta Garbo, he published a group of his impromptu pictures in the Times in December 1978, which soon became a regular series. One day he took a picture of a woman wearing a fur coat he liked and discovered she was the reclusive septuagenarian Greta Garbo. He took the photo of Garbo for the expensive otter coat he wore and his elegant cut. His picture that first captured the attention of the New York Times in 1978 was of an off-duty Greta Garbo. Bill Cunningham and Greta Garbo Here are a pair of articles from 2002 on street fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, who currently plys his trade for the NY Times. At the start of his career, Cunningham took a photo of Greta Garbo without knowing it was the famously reclusive, camera-shy movie star. He claimed not to have noticed it was Garbo… The Times bought the photo, and the rest is fashion history. ABOUT BILL. Garbo by Bill Cunningham So did Bill Cunningham, who had the chance to photograph Garbo in New York. For decades, Cunningham has been the informal, almost invisible but all-seeing eye of the fashion world, catching images of its traveling troupe of characters—models, designers, stylists, celebrities, and …