Born: 15 July 1894, United States
Died: 23 January 1978
Country most active: United States, Russia, Finland
Also known as: Mabel Thérèse Bonney
The following is republished from the Library of Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
War’s mindless uprooting of innocent civilians provided the principal subject for photographer Therese Bonney (1894-1978) during World War II. Bonney’s images of homeless children and adults on the backroads of Europe touched millions of viewers in the United States and abroad.
Educated at Berkeley, Harvard, Columbia, and the Sorbonne, Bonney settled in Paris in 1919 to pursue photography and promote cultural exchange between France and the United States. The outbreak of World War II appalled Bonney, who believed the conflict threatened European civilization itself. Of her “truth raids” into the countryside to document the horror of war, Bonney said: “I go forth alone, try to get the truth and then bring it back and try to make others face it and do something about it.”
Not content with publishing solely in mass-circulation newspapers and magazines, Bonney sought other opportunities to present her work. She published the photo-essay books “War Comes to the People” (1940) and “Europe’s Children” (1943) and mounted one-woman shows at the Library of Congress, the Museum of Modern Art, and dozens of museums overseas. Bonney’s concept for a film about children displaced by war became the Academy Award- winning movie, “The Search” (1948). A media star herself, Bonney was the heroine of a wartime comic book, “Photofighter.”