Thérèse Bonney, the Bonney Service and the Business of Syndicated Photography, 1922–45

Abstract

Photography by Thérèse Bonney (1894–1978) has appeared in exhibitions on women’s roles within modernism and World War II, and research has been completed on aspects of her most famous publication: Europe’s Children (1943). Yet scholars have not grappled with the importance of her syndicated business, the Bonney Service, in the distribution of ideas around the globe, or how to reconcile her photographs of design with her later images of World War II. Her desire was to train the eye to feel the haptic qualities of her images and distinguish through careful looking her intertwining of materiality, identity and democratic values. She understood the need to share multiple images over a sustained time to convince people that her pictorial interpretation was accurate. As part of a larger book project rooted in a years-long investigation of Bonney’s archive, this article seeks to begin these complicated conversations about Bonney’s legacy in the USA and her artistic range, and to reinsert Bonney into the history of photography she helped canonise but in which she has since been minimised.