Wartime Follies: Thérèse Bonney Between Past and Future

Thérèse Bonney (USA, 1894–1978) was the first woman photographer to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York in 1940. This article considers Thérèse Bonney’s significant career in photography and her subsequent historical omission from traditional histories of photography. Although she photographed in Finland and across Europe during the Second World War, visited concentration camps and photographed the ruins of war in its aftermath alongside Lee Miller and Margaret Bourke-White, she is hardly known today. Bonney was a significant (medal-awarded) wartime photographer whose work focused on the impact of war on civilians’ social lives and everyday conditions, especially the plight of lost and abandoned children. This article discusses how her wartime photographic work appears later as a wartime folly, subsequently excluded from dominant postwar narratives of MoMA’s history of art photography.