Chevrolet Truck,

1957

<p> Focusing on the grille and headlights of a Chevy truck, Bunnell highlights the vehicle’s curved forms and material makeup. A tangled rope in the lower-left corner contrasts with the hard-edged metal and glass. Bunnell’s study of form, contrast, and texture shows his debt to the photographer Minor White, who taught Bunnell’s photography classes at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A teacher, writer, and artist, White espoused the idea that “the eye that sees also shapes”—in other words, the photographer does not merely record the world but actively crafts a vision of it. Bunnell would continue to take photographs throughout his life and would profoundly shape the field of photographic history. As the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton, a position he accepted in 1972 and held for thirty years, Bunnell himself educated a generation of undergraduate and graduate students. As the first curator of photography, and later director, at the Princeton University Art Museum, he also built a world-class collection of photography. </p>