On the most recent episode of Doc Chat on November 19, 2020, we explored the intersection of gender and modernism in early 20th-century photography.

An ongoing series from NYPL's Center for Research in the Humanities, Doc Chat pairs a NYPL curator or specialist and a scholar to discuss evocative digitized items from the Library's collections and brainstorm innovative ways of teaching with them. In Episode 11 of Doc Chat, NYPL's Elizabeth Cronin and Andrea Nelson of the National Gallery of Art discussed the little known histories of two female photographers, Thérèse Bonney and Elizabeth Buehrmann, whose artistic and editorial work pushes us to expand and rethink definitions of modern photography.

A transcript of this event is available here.

Below are some handy links to materials and sources suggested in the episode. 

Episode Eleven: Primary Sources

Below are links to some of the photographs that Elizabeth and Andrea analyzed.

[Pictured above]: Thérèse Bonney, What London wears (1926), NYPL Digital Collections, Image ID: 3962650. 

NYPL's photography collection includes over 6,000 works by Bonney; 18 are digitized.

NYPL's photography collection includes over 100 works by Buehrmann; 52 are digitized.

Episode Eleven: Reading and Resources 

Thérèse Bonney, Europe's Children, 1939 to 1943 (New York: Published by "Children in Peril" [Thérèse Bonney], 1943).

Olga Dahl, “Woman in Commercial Photography,” Camera Craft 31 (1924): 577. 

Fotografieren hieß teilnehmen: Fotografinnen der Weimarer Republik, ed. Ute Eskildsen (Essen: Museum Folkwang, 1994)

Helen Goodman, “Elizabeth Buehrmann: American Pictorialist” History of Photography 19, no.4 (1995): 338-342.

Andrea Nelson, The New Woman Behind the Camera (Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art, 2020).

Elizabeth Otto and Vanessa Rocco, eds., The New Woman International: Representations in Photography and Film from the 1870s through the 1960s (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011).

Abigail Solomon-Godeau, “New Women and New Vision Photography in the Crucible of Modernity,” Le magazine: Jeu de Paume, October 21, 2015.

Alys Eve Weinbaum, Lynn M. Thomas, Priti Ramamurthy, Uta G. Poiger, Madeleine Yue Dong, and Tani E. Barlow, eds., The Modern Girl Around the World: Consumption, Modernity, and Globalization (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).

Clarence H. White, “Photography as a Profession for Women,” News-Bulletin of the Bureau of Vocational Information, April 1, 1924, 50.

Women Photographers: European Experience, ed. Lena Johannesson and Gunilla Knape (Gothenburg, Sweden, 2003).