The Photographic Practice of M. Thérèse Bonney (original) (raw)

2020, Lunchbag Seminar, Archives of American Art

My work argues that Thérèse Bonney (1894-1978), a prolific yet overlooked American photographer and writer, created portraits, publications, and exhibitions that changed Americans’ understanding of the world and themselves between 1920 and 1970. Her portraits—4,300 of which reside at the Smithsonian—depict famous artists, war-ravaged towns, starving children, concentration camp internees, fashion spreads, rural farm life, architectural interiors, and families fleeing Nazi persecution. Together, they speak to the role of press photography in a new American culture embracing modernity. Bonney’s business practices also open new opportunities to study transnational networks of photojournalism as forms of visual culture. I argue that the ontological boundaries of her work reveal the globalization of politicized art and her invention of long-lasting cultural categories around gender and social justice. Bonney’s trail-blazing life had a dramatic impact on the progress of women in the male-dominated professions of photographer, journalist, business owner, and curator. Further, she inspired women’s increased autonomy in the United States, Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Middle East. Her writings and exhibitions contributed to the canons of design, gender, modernism, photography, and war history. Her publications also manifest the entanglement of cultures precipitated by a new global information economy.