Peter C. Bunnell, whose passionate and inspired teaching profoundly changed the field of photographic history, passed away at his home in Princeton, New Jersey, on Monday, 20 September 2021. 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; his was the first endowed professorship in the history of photography at any American university.
An enthralling storyteller with a deep personal knowledge of the medium’s history, an infectious enthusiasm, and an unfailing devotion to his students, Bunnell drew capacity crowds to his undergraduate courses and attracted graduate students from across the country and beyond. 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; Aperture; Brown University; Indiana University; City College of New York; Bard College; Bowling Green State University; and Zurich University of the Arts, among others.
As curator of photography at the Princeton University Art Museum throughout his 30-year tenure on the faculty, and as Museum Director from 1973 to 1978 and Acting Director again from 1998 to 2000, Bunnell built a broad-ranging collection of photography, the first-hand examination of which became an unforgettable central element of the student experience in his classes and seminars. “These photographs are used,” he said, “they don't just sit around in boxes.” In fact, he taught all of the discussion sections of his courses himself, always with original photographs rather than with slides. Photographer and former Princeton professor Emmet Gowin recalls Bunnell’s extraordinary gift for “awakening and reaching the hearts and minds of students of all kinds, but especially his ability to connect with and support students attempting to practice the art of photography themselves.” At the time of Bunnell’s retirement in 2002, Gowin praised his capacity to understand the work of artists “who were in no way synchronous with his own stances or world views. To a degree almost unthinkable, the collection he built at Princeton is without gender bias or cultural bias, but embracing of all that was fresh and difficult in the work of young contemporary artists.”
Allen Rosenbaum, who Bunnell hired as Assistant Director of the Museum in 1974 and who succeeded him as Director, similarly recalls his generosity, noting that “there was no ego or vanity in his directorship.” Rosenbaum vividly recalls having been invited to a class led by Bunnell and Gowin and having come away with “a sense of the great gifts of these men as thinkers and communicators, and with the revelation—at least for me—that there was such a thing as connoisseurship in photography.”
In addition to the expansive and carefully selected collection that Bunnell built for the Museum, spanning the history of the medium, he secured two important archives—those of Pictorialist photographer Clarence H. White, the subject of his Master’s thesis at Ohio University, and Minor White, Bunnell’s own mentor as a photographer and interpreter of the medium. He met Minor White as an undergraduate at the Rochester Institute of Technology, where classes taught by White nurtured his burgeoning interest in photography. “I took his classes, and, as was his practice, he drew a group of students around him outside the Institute,” recalled Bunnell. “These were informal sessions where he explored in more depth his philosophy and attitudes toward photographing.” Bunnell went on to receive a Master of Fine Arts in photography from Ohio University in 1961 under the tutelage of Clarence H. White Jr., as well as an M.A. in art history from Yale University in 1965, where he began a doctoral dissertation on the life and work of Alfred Stieglitz.
Immediately before joining the Princeton faculty in 1972, Peter Bunnell served as curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, where he had joined the staff in 1960 as a collection cataloguer and risen to associate curator in 1968 and curator in 1970. At MoMA, Bunnell’s achievements included ground-breaking exhibitions that offered innovative new avenues to analyze and understand photography: Photography as Printmaking (1968), and Photography into Sculpture (1970), as well as an exhibition of the work of Clarence H. White (1971). In addition to exhibitions at Princeton in subsequent years, including a continuous series of installations designed for students in his courses, Bunnell organized the Harry Callahan exhibition for the United States Pavilion at the 38th Venice Biennale in 1978.
Beyond his role as teacher and curator, Bunnell served the field in various capacities—as national chair of the Society for Photographic Education and chair of the board of The Friends of Photography—and was the recipient of numerous honors and awards including fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation (1979) and the Asian Cultural Council (1984). He was also named an Honorary Fellow of the Royal Photographic Society.
Peter Bunnell wrote extensively on topics across the history of photography, though primarily about American artists, and most often about living photographers, many of whom he knew personally. His numerous essays have been anthologized in Degrees of Guidance: Essays on Twentieth-Century American Photography (1993) and Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth-Century Photography (2006). His book Minor White: The Eye That Shapes, which accompanied a retrospective exhibition of White’s photographs that opened at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989, won the George Wittenborn Memorial Award of the Art Libraries Society of North America. He also authored three monographs on Jerry N. Uelsmann, his undergraduate roommate at Rochester Institute of Technology and a lifelong friend. In addition, he edited several anthologies—A Photographic Vision: Pictorial Photography, 1889–1923 (1980); Edward Weston on Photography (1983); and Aperture Magazine Anthology: The Minor White Years, 1952–1976 (2012); and co-edited two Arno Press reprint series, The Literature of Photography and The Sources of Modern Photography.
Long into retirement, Bunnell happily remained an invaluable source for researchers in the history of photography who called upon his recollections of firsthand encounters with twentieth-century photographers, recollections aided by file cabinets filled with decades of carefully taken notes, newspaper clippings, and other seldom-saved ephemera—an invaluable resource that will become available to future scholars at Princeton’s Art Museum and Firestone Library.
Peter Curtis Bunnell was born in 1937 in Poughkeepsie, New York, the son of Harold C. Bunnell and Ruth L. Buckhout. He is not survived by immediate family but is held dear in the memory of the many students, scholars, artists, and curators who benefited immensely from his wisdom and deep generosity of spirit. Following his wishes, no funeral service will be held, but friends, colleagues, and protégés will gather at a later date to celebrate his life.
Malcolm Daniel, Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston
Picture: Princeton University
Another obituary is available here: https://planetprinceton.com/2021/09/21/photography-scholar-and-former-princeton-university-art-museum-director-peter-bunnell-dies-at-83/
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