Thérèse Bonney and the Power of Global Syndicated Photography

FAIN: FEL-288833-23

Caroline M. Riley
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Research and writing leading to a book on the life and works of photojournalist and entrepreneur Thérèse Bonney (1894-1978).

My book on Therese Bonney (1894–1978), a prolific photographer, collector, curator, filmmaker, humanitarian, and American spy, explores how Americans learned about international conflicts through the syndication of her photographs. Concerns over syndication still test democracies today, as they rely on the transmission of accurate news to inform voters and hold leaders to account. She founded the Bonney Service in 1922, the first American illustrated press service in Europe. Through it, she dispersed photographs taken in nineteen countries to a global market of thirty-three nations. Her biography and artistic practice reveal her invention of longlasting cultural categories around gender and social justice. Her photographic and business innovations also permitted the dissemination of Bonney herself as a professional woman artist. Through these photographs and her curatorial work, she contributed to the histories of gender, modernism, journalism, photography, and warfare.

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Thérèse Bonney, the Bonney Service, and the Business of Syndicated Photography, 1923–1945 (Article)
Title: Thérèse Bonney, the Bonney Service, and the Business of Syndicated Photography, 1923–1945
Author: Caroline M. Riley
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.
Year: 2024
Primary URL: http://doi.org/10.1080/03087298.2024.2409581
Format: Journal
Publisher: History of Photography

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