Peter Curtis Bunnell (October[1] 25, 1937 – September 20, 2021)[2][3] was an American author, scholar and historian of photography. For more than 40 years he had a significant impact on collecting, exhibiting, teaching and practicing photography through his work as a university professor, museum curator and prolific author.

Life and career

Peter Curtis Bunnell was born on October 25, 1937, in Poughkeepsie, New York.[4] He received an undergraduate degree from the Rochester Institute of Technology, where he studied with photographer Minor White,[2][5] and an M.F.A. from Ohio University,[2] where he studied with Clarence H. White Jr., the son of the pictorial photographer Clarence Hudson White. He then went on to receive an M.A. degree in art history from Yale University, and later become an associate in the Alfred Stieglitz Archive at the university.[2]

Bunnell joined the Museum of Modern Art staff in New York in 1966, on a temporary assignment to review and catalogue its collection of photographs, and in 1968 became Associate Curator of the Department of Photography.[6] In 1970 he was named the Curator of the Department of Photography at the Museum.[6][5] Two years later he was invited to teach at Princeton University and was given the position of David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art.[2][5] This was the first endowed professorship in the history of photography in the United States.[7][8] That same year he curated a show at the museum called Photography into Sculpture, the first comprehensive survey of photographically formed images used in a sculptural manner.[9][10] The show has been called "one of the great contributions to the history of photography"[11] due to its intent to redefine photography in a new spatial concept.

From 1973 to 1978 Bunnell was also the Director of the Princeton University Art Museum,[2] where he helped build the collection of photographic holdings into "one of the great North American teaching collections."[12] He later served as Curator of the Minor White Archive and as Curator of Photography at Princeton University Art Museum.[2]

In 1979 he was awarded a Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship[2] for further study of the history of photography. Bunnell received a fellowship from the Asian Cultural Council in 1984 that enabled him to travel and lecture extensively in Japan. He returned briefly to Japan in 1995 as a consultant to the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo.[2] He later taught at New York University, Dartmouth College, Yale University and the University of Florida.[2]

In 2002, Bunnell retired from his post at Princeton. That same year the U.S. Postal Service issued a set of postage stamps called Masters of American Photography featuring photographers and images selected by Bunnell.[7]

In 2011, Princeton University announced the endowment of the Peter C. Bunnell Curatorship in Photography.

As the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University, a position he accepted in 1972 and held for 30 years before his retirement, Bunnell educated a generation of undergraduate and graduate students in what is still a young branch of art history ... A testament to the widespread and lasting influence of his teaching, Bunnell's Princeton protégés have served as curators and professors at leading institutions including the Metropolitan Museum; the Museum of Modern Art; The Morgan Library; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; George Eastman Museum; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the International Center of Photography; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Fotostiftung Schweiz [de]; Aperture; Brown University; Indiana University; City College of New York; Bard College; Bowling Green State University; and Zurich University of the Arts, among others.[13]

In April 2019, Bunnell donated about 110 archival boxes of materials from his personal archive (Peter C. Bunnell Papers) to the Manuscripts Division of the Princeton University Library. The papers donated to the Library complemented a separate gift to the Princeton University Art Museum of more than 30 years of his correspondence and other materials relating to its Minor White and Clarence H. White archival collections.[14]

Bunnell died on September 20, 2021, in Princeton, New Jersey,[4] following a lengthy illness. He was 83.[3]

Publications

• Jerry N. Uelsmann: An Aperture Monograph (1970)
• Barbara Morgan (1972)
• Nonsilver Printing Processes: Four Selections 1886–1927 (1973) ISBN 0405049528
• Harry Callahan (1978) ISBN 0847802019
• Altered Landscapes: The Photographs of John Pfahl (1981) ISBN 978-0933286238
• Edward Weston on Photography (1983) ISBN 0879051477[2]
• Clarence H. White: The Reverence for Beauty (1986) ISBN 978-0933041011[2]
• Minor White: The Eye That Shapes (1989) ISBN 978-0943012094[5]
• A Photographic Vision: Pictorial Photography 1889-1923 (1980) ISBN 978-0879050597[2]
• Emmet Gowin: Photographs 1966–1983 (1983)
• EW:100. Centennial Essays in Honor of Edward Weston (1986) ISBN 978-0933286443
• Light Years: The Friends of Photography 1967-1985 (1987) ISBN 978-0933286481
• Alfred Stieglitz: Photographs from the Collection of Georgia O’Keeffe (1993) ISBN
• Degrees of Guidance: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Photography (1993) ISBN 978-0521327510
• Ruth Bernhard: The Collection of Ginny Williams (1993) ISBN 978-1881138044
• Photography at Princeton: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography (1998) ISBN 978-0943012261
• Edward Ranney Photographs: The John B. Elliott Collection (2003) ISBN 978-0943012391
• Michael Kenna: A Twenty Year Retrospective (2003) ISBN 978-1590050194
• Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2006) ISBN 978-1597110211
• Eye Mind Spirit: The Enduring Legacy of Minor White (2009) ISBN 0974886300
• Walter Chappell: Eternal Impermanence (2013) ISBN 8857218724

Exhibitions curated

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[15][16]

References