As curator of photography, 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 firsthand 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 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’s of fine arts in photography from Ohio University in 1961 under the tutelage of Clarence H. White Jr., as well as a master’s 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, 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 groundbreaking 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. 

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 MoMA 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 coedited 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 the Princeton University Art Museum and Firestone Library. 

Peter Curtis Bunnell 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.

It is my privilege to celebrate the life of our good friend Peter Bunnell: intellectual and curatorial pioneer, stalwart museum director, renowned teacher and mentor, and perhaps most of all, beloved friend. 

Fifty years ago, Peter arrived at Princeton as the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography, the first endowed professorship of photography at any American university.  

He was tasked with establishing, in his words, “a major center where the serious student and scholar may undertake intensive studies. [. . .] Eventually we hope to provide for universities and museums elsewhere the necessary staff to develop a new depth in the study of photography.” 

Leaving a job he loved as curator of photography at MoMA to come to Princeton wasn’t an easy decision, but one that he felt was necessary for establishing photography as a legitimate field of art historical study.  

He told The New York Times, “I was terribly conflicted about it. . . . I went through one of those walk-on-the-beach moments, and I realized that . . . if we were going to move the field of photographic history forward, we needed the strength of a great university behind it.” 

I will largely leave it to others to discuss aspects of Peter’s legacy as curator, teacher, and leader, but I do want to touch on a few aspects of his legacy. 

First, I feel gratitude to Peter almost every day for his brilliance and audacity as a collector and a cultivator of other collectors. Not only did he build for Princeton canonical collections, but he collected against and before fashion in ways that can only look strangely prescient in hindsight. Just to cite one example, on the occasion of his retirement, more than fifty artists donated over one hundred works of art in his honor. 

Second, even now I feel personally the legacy of his teaching, whether it is the warmth of memories others share about Peter in the classroom—including the stories about the dangling cigarette ash hovering over the irreplaceable print in the study rooms—and yet never falling—or the recollection of life-changing experiences that shaped students into future collectors, many of whom now support us in turn. 

Peter’s values as a teacher were obvious even to the New York Times, which wrote that, “Mr. Bunnell sees the dual missions of teacher and curator as intertwined. The collection is above all a teaching tool. Perhaps even more important to Mr. Bunnell than having created an outstanding collection is the fact that he has developed a cadre of graduate students to follow in his footsteps and spread the word about photographic history.”  

Peter wrote, in the very first sentence of the introduction to his book Photography: Celebrating Twenty-Five Years of Collecting and Teaching the History of Photography at Princeton (1998): “The relationship of a university art museum to the teaching program in the history of art is as basic as a laboratory to the student of biology or chemistry.”  

Many of you—curators, teachers, photographers, museum directors, collectors—prove that Peter amply accomplished his goal of training “the necessary staff to develop a new depth in the study of photography,” and I know how much it would mean to Peter to see you gathered today. 

Third, and briefly, Peter the person.  

It was a rather happy accident that I got to know Peter when I started as director more than thirteen years ago. Peter had retired several years earlier, but as an emeritus faculty member he still retained many privileges, including the use of the Museum’s sole typewriter, which he continued to use to type letters long after the advent of personal computers and email—which he fiercely resisted, ultimately losing a long battle with the University to end his email account, to his great frustration. 

As much as Peter remained a devotee of the typewriter, he remained committed to the printed document. I personally first got to know Peter largely because of this habit. The Museum’s primary photocopier used to sit right outside my office door, and this lured Peter to my end of the hallway on most of his visits to the Museum, leading to fortuitous conversation as we chatted through the doorway. In every instance I can remember, Peter was generous to a fault in advocating for me, alerting me to where the bodies were buried, effecting introductions to collectors, and so much more. Never did I feel him looking over my shoulder. Years later, when the project of making a new museum began to take shape, Peter met such a prospect with a mix of excitement and wonder, eager to see the emerging designs. Whatever trepidation about institutional change he might have had, he was generous enough to hide his anxiety and never to burden me with it. 

One of my happiest achievements, and occasions, to date was successfully concluding fundraising to endow and name our curatorship of photography in Peter’s honor. As many of you will know, honorific fundraising is not usually particularly easy. But as a then relative newcomer to Princeton, I was overwhelmed by the warmth of feeling that led those who could to contribute generously to establishing that endowment. 

To those who contributed, you know, I think, what this meant to Peter. Joel and Kate, you know, I think, the pride with which Peter regarded your roles as the first two incumbents of that curatorship. The day we dedicated the position in Peter’s honor, his well-known ability to wear his heart on his sleeve was on ample display; we knew we couldn’t ask Peter to offer remarks of any length because he would (and did) be overcome with emotion. But seeing Peter’s sheer, unfiltered humanity on display touches me still. 

James Steward is the Nancy A. Nasher–David J. Haemisegger, Class of 1976, Director of the Princeton University Art Museum. 

Well, you all know that Peter Bunnell loved photography and he also loved a good story. And when I thought about what can I say about Peter, I thought about, well, what are the stories that I can tell in public that epitomize how I feel about Peter? And we've a lot of connections, not the least of which was the fact that he showed our work with Robert Adams in 1972 at the Museum of Modern Art before he left to go to Princeton. Peter may have had some gymnastic skill to align Robert Adams and I in the same exhibition, and the reviewer in the New York Times a week or so later was even more blunt in his assessment of the show, the headline in the New York Times, read “Lifeless, With or Without People.”

But anyhow, to go along to the stories. The first, in a way, exemplifies Peter's humanity. I mean, he loved photography, but he cared about the people that he became close with. And this story involves my classmate from Rhode Island School to design Jim Dow. And Jim Dow was solicited by Peter and John Szarkowski to print the Walker Evans negatives. Jim had already known Evans for several years from when in 1966, Jim and I went to meet Evans. We sat at Adlai Stevenson's table at the Century Club. He was clear to tell us where we were sitting and that and at whose table. And we went up to his apartment on the east side later that afternoon. But it was a very short meeting. But Jim kept up with Evans. Jim wrote his paper in Rhode Island on Evans and had some contact with him after Evans was at Yale. Jim had received his draft notice and at the same time there was this competing interest in having Jim print the Walker Evans negatives. And Jim tells me the story of going nervously to his appointment at the draft office, expecting that all of his letters would of reference would be in place. And, and Jim just recently confirmed for me that in fact, only one letter had arrived. He was sitting in the draft office the morning that the postman brought the letter from John Szarkowski and Harry Callahan. He watched as the postman laid them on the table. The, the administrator, the draft office came through a door holding one letter, said: “I don't know who this Peter Bunnell is, but he's some hell of a writer. This is the best letter I've ever read. The committee never makes a decision without three letters, but they just approved this with one letter.” And they, they hadn't read the Szakowski letter or the Harry Callahan letter, and they said, young man, you're in love. You won the jackpot today. And so it came to be that Jim printed for Evans for three or four years. And it was at a time where we saw each other, often we were sharing information. Jim was telling me what he learned from Evans about printing. Well, the, the story was simply filed away. We may have expressed our, I'm sure Jim expressed his gratitude to Peter for such a brilliant letter. I don't know that I could have imagined what was in such a letter, but I was deeply appreciative of it because the lineage that ran through Evans to Jim and sort of crept over into me was immensely valuable in just every way. I mean Jim would call, “we're using this developer now. Have you ever heard of that?” And I said, “no, but I'm ordering some now.” It was just so many things and, and the regard that I held for Peter for that one thing alone. And that predates knowing Peter personally well enough to have him arrange and edit a show from the Museum of Modern Art.

Right. The other story is simple in its way, but it, it exemplifies what in my mind, demonstrates how photography has changed since the days of Light Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art, museum of Modern Art shows where the, the photograph was matted and put behind a piece of glass and sealed with a piece of white tape and put on the wall with, it was something a little more elegant than a couple of nails. But it wasn't much more elegant, maybe elegant, yeah. It was something, it was there. And, and there has been an evolution in the respect for, for photography. I of course didn't know who David McAlpin was really, except I recognized the name. McAlpin is a key personality and benefactor to the photography program at Princeton, which everyone in the program knows. But I had really never heard of David McAlpin. But when Peter first mentioned McAlpin, or when it was public publicized, that McAlpin had funded the professorship in the history photography and had arranged or put his blessing on having Peter come from the modern to be the person, the first professor in the history photography. I recognized who that was because it's an Edward Weston portrait of McAlpin standing on the roof of his hotel in New York. But otherwise, all I knew about McAlpin except a sense of gratitude that Peter was selected for this very important position, and with the sense that I knew he would be the right person to do this. I didn’t at that point know that it involved me in any way. But later, after attending a couple of Peter's seminars at Princeton and giving little in-class presentations and having students come up after a presentation saying, “we wish you could come here and teach.” I thought, well, that's not such a bad idea. But I still was not actually aware that that was a possibility. It seemed very distant, unlikely thing. I was still teaching at the community college here in Bucks County. Well, a year or so into my experience at Princeton one day with Peter in the collection rooms, which were very small then and Peter was very excited. “Oh, you, you must see the Westons that came from David McAlpin.” And I said, “Well, I would love to see the, the Westons that came from McAlpin.” And we're going through them. And I said, Peter, “what happened to all the great ones?” I said, “these are all terrific pictures, but these are the pictures that people will say who made them. And only probably after realizing that it's an Edward Weston, would they say, oh yes, that's really great too. So where are the fantastic Westons?” He said, “well, it's interesting. The, the reality is that before the program in the history of photography, before the professorship, McAlpin came to Princeton and said, would you like my collection? And they said, it's photography. Photography isn't an art. Sorry, we only deal with art here.” So that collection was taken to the Museum of Modern Art to be edited by none other than Peter. Peter was the one who selected out the most important pictures, which then entered the collection at MoMA. So what Peter and I were looking at that spring day in 1974 or 1975 were the Edward Westons that were left over.

What's so vivid is the way in which Peter survived that loss and went on to concentrate in contemporary photography and, with a budget that was extremely meager, managed nonetheless to follow the most recent activity by the most creative people, and at least add one example of the newest work being done within that time period.

This is a memorial to Peter Bennell, you will cherish his memory, but you are the living memorial to Peter because your practice every day is the embodiment of what you've learned, what you experienced being close to Peter. It's the best memorial a person could have—a living memorial and you are all that memorial.

In short, Peter changed my life—setting me on an unexpected path that has been richly rewarding, and I suspect that many of you feel the same. 

Unlike some of his students, I did not come to Princeton to study with Peter—never heard of him, to be honest. He was on sabbatical my first year, but he had a reputation and I remember graduate secretary June Bliss telling me not to miss the chance to take his seminar. And so, at the start of my second year I signed up for Peter’s seminar—on the place of photography at the various nineteenth-century exhibitions—1851 in London’s Crystal Palace, the 1855 Universal Exposition in Paris, the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures exhibition—and this was the start of the seduction, pulling me into the world of photography. Without hesitation, I signed up for his second semester seminar—this time focused on Minor White—and here Peter’s deep personal knowledge of the artist, his profound understanding of the work, his irrepressible enthusiasm lifted our study from a merely academic realm into something more alive. And the opportunity to do primary research in the archive that he had brought to Princeton, with prints, negatives, newspaper clippings, daybooks—all of this was a type of art history that felt—to me—infinitely more attractive than looking at reproductions of Renaissance chapel frescoes or German architecture. And so, I was an official convert into the photo world, won over, in part by the opportunity to explore what was still, in many ways, virgin territory, but equally won over by the force of Peter’s knowledge and his devotion to his students. 

I don’t know if Peter actually had office hours. His office door was always open, and if he wasn’t there, it probably meant that he was at his other office. And for those of us who, like me, had always envisioned a museum career rather than an academic one, Peter’s insistence on teaching with actual works of art in-hand—drawn from the collection he had carefully built—rather than merely delivering slide lectures, was both inspiring and instructive. At a time when many people felt a deep divide between the museum and the academy, Peter was an example of a bridge between the two. 

In later years, of course, Peter followed my progress, encouraged me, and expressed pride in what I accomplished; and my admiration and respect and friendship remained strong, so I felt honored to have been asked to serve as one of his executors (a task I naively underestimated, I might add), and to see that his library and collection would be sold to maximize the benefit to the six institutions he designated as his beneficiaries: RIT, Ohio University, and Yale; MoMA, Eastman House, and the Princeton University Art Museum, in each case to establish a named endowment in support of photography. 

In the course of clearing his house at 40 McCosh Circle alongside fellow executor Jill Guthrie, I caught a glimpse into Peter’s life through childhood photographs, pictures of a dashing and distinguished MoMA curator and Princeton professor, and beach snapshots with Jerry Uelsmann down at Longboat Key, some of which you’ll see on the looping slide show.  

And I got a fuller appreciation of Peter’s persona. I knew what an inveterate notetaker Peter was, and what a rich resource was contained in the file cabinets lining his home office (now a resource for future scholars at the Art Museum and Firestone). Like other students, I had received Peter’s neatly typed comments about my seminar papers, typed like just about every letter I received in later years. But still, Jill Guthrie and I were surprised to find seven typewriters at the house—practically a museum of typewriter technology from a portable manual model to an IBM selectric—this last with a note—typewritten, of course—that read: “This IBM typewriter is NOT in working order. It was serviced a few years ago and I was told new parts for it were no longer available; so it is beyond repair. I have set it aside in June 2020.” True to the historian that he was—it seemed baked into his personality—everything was to be documented neatly and preserved for future reference. His attention to detail was apparent too in the stack of index cards (again typed, of course) on a table by the thermostat, recording since 2005 each year’s firing up of the furnace, the date, the starting room temperature, the setting, how long it took to raise the temperature to the proper level, when the filter was changed, and such. Clearly this was a man who could be trusted to organize and preserve the archives of a few great photographers. 

My relationship with Peter was not one of home-cooked dinners, late-night drinks, and confidences, as some others enjoyed. I wish it had been. 

Yes, I did enjoy a few dinners at Peter’s home—usually after a visiting artist or scholar’s talk, and the comradery and warmth of those evenings remain more vivid in my memory than the food. . . but there on the kitchen counter were eight thick numbered looseleaf notebooks filled with recipes clipped from the New York Times, shared by friends, or xeroxed out of cookbooks (organized of course by subject—one binder for general sauces and salads, one for vegetables, one for baking and eggs, etc.), all of these now in the care of his longtime friend Martha Strawn. He was a meticulous researcher, archivist, curator. . . beyond the museum. 

My debt to Peter is enormous, my affection for him true. We miss hearing his jovial, booming voice, miss the chance to pump him for information, miss the friendship and encouragement. There are stacks of books with Peter’s writing (and I think you will be encouraged to select a few as a keepsake), but I believe he considered us, gathered here, his most important accomplishment.

A graduate student of Peter’s, Malcolm Daniel received his PhD from Princeton in 1990. After twenty-three years in the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Photographs, including nine as Curator-in-Charge, Daniel moved in 2013 to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he leads the Photography Department as the Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator. He is an executor of Peter’s estate. 

However much Peter gave me intellectually–and he opened my eyes to photography–he meant even more as a model of energy: of application. He had come from nowhere into the world of what totally fascinated him. You could tell that vigor had got him where he was. 

To meet him was to impersonate him. He bounded into rooms, and his voice rang out, he pounded out letters and zipped them out of the Selectric. In the stories he told, he was forever “amazed.” Virtually anyone he knew was greeted, upon arrival, with a “There she is!” At the end of a snack break, we’d file back into the seminar room to the cry of “We’re doin’ it!” 

No novelist could have invented a better character for the underdog role of photography in the house Panofsky built. Loveably, Peter used the word “positivism” to mean adopting a charitable attitude. He was his own brand of positivist, and the climate he generated freed us to pose questions about the field that led straight out of his comfort zone. 

Several of us called him Dad—not to his face—and the label made sense, because he clearly expected us to outgrow him. Being, now, a few years older than he was then, I appreciate how challenging it is to watch the young pick at the plate of your best efforts, leaving most of it untouched. That’s the soul of a real teacher: accepting that the next generation is hearing you from a different place than you’ve ever stood, and is going to take your lessons to places you’ll never begin to appreciate. 

One signal gap between Peter and (I think) just about all of his advisees, in the ’90s, was the attraction of snapshots. For reasons that were probably as Freudian as they were aesthetic, those of us born in the ’60s were drawn to personal photos from the era of our parents’ youths, and our grandparents’. Even if Peter could give a baffled smile for some odd example that one of us brought in, fresh from the weekend’s flea market, the ordinariness of the motives behind such images left him cold. Peter truly lived a perspective that Minor White had lived before him, and Alfred Stieglitz before Minor: a photograph that wasn’t after transcendence of some kind could not enthrall him. 

I wrote my dissertation about a body of work by Stieglitz. Naturally I was conscious that Peter had abandoned a Stieglitz dissertation, at Yale, to take his first job at MoMA. But he never mistook my project for finishing something he’d started. So later, when I came back to Princeton to take the curatorial position he retired from, I had no anxiety about occupying what was, obviously, his space. I’d already been there and known it as a space of freedom. He told us all the story about how John Szarkowski, at MoMA, finally had to ask his predecessor, Edward Steichen, to stop coming in and hanging out in the offices. I never asked Peter to stop coming in, which he did once a week. Peter knew he had created something here and evolved it—and because of how much he cared about creating and evolving, he respected the spirit of not-knowing and the spirit of change. I’ll always be grateful for that. 

Joel Smith came from California to enroll in graduate study at Princeton in 1991. Nine years later he submitted a dissertation on the late cityscapes of Alfred Stieglitz. In 2005, after five years in a generalist curatorial position at Vassar College, he returned to Princeton to take the position that became, during his seven-year tenure, the Peter C. Bunnell Curatorship in Photography. In 2012 he was invited to launch a photography department at the Morgan Library & Museum, where he continues to serve today as Richard L. Menschel Curator and department head. 

Let me begin with a candid observation. For all his joviality, Peter was a singularly private man. I benefited enormously from his kindness, yet I often felt that I didn’t know him terribly well. I’m quite certain that others felt this way, too. At moments I was bewildered by him. But in time I grew to respect his unique way of navigating the world. Some of his later graduate students had an affectionate nickname for him. Peter’s initials, PCB, were translated as the “Planet Called Bunnell.” This encapsulated both his truly independent way of seeing and doing things, and something of his physical presence in space. 

More about Peter’s way of seeing things. His private nature was balanced by his open mind. People didn’t always see this, or perhaps they understood his aversion to intellectual partisanship as an absence of intellectual rigor. But that would be a mistake. Rooted in his training as a photographer and curator, Peter approached photographs first as objects, and then as images or ideas. (He applied this approach of course to unique creations, but also, when appropriate, to the pages of magazines and books.) He was genuinely interested in understanding the artistic motivations for objects that held his interest. We see this in his various writings and projects about Pictorialism, perhaps especially Gertrude Kasebier, and also in quite different curatorial efforts such Photography Into Sculpture, the exhibition he mounted at MoMA in 1970. 

As my references to some of Peter projects demonstrate, he was drawn to artists and movements outside the main narratives of modernist art history. For a graduate student, this was sometimes confounding. But in retrospect, I think of it as akin to having all the windows open in the seminar room. There were always other things going on in the world, and we should be aware of them. So, when a student would mention Cindy Sherman or Sarah Charlesworth, Peter might bring up other names: Eileen Cowin or Susan Rankaitis. Today, in my own work as a curator, these are all artists whose work I care about. And I credit Peter for that. 

Now, I really learned that Peter was open-minded because he often disagreed with me. This happened from the first time we met during my application interview to come to Princeton, until our last phone conversation, when I told him about my latest project. He would always disagree with me gently, unless he thought I had my facts wrong. That brings me to the final thing I want to say, and something that I think all his students will recognize. Peter was sometimes hard to know, but his support for us was constant and clear, even when we pursued topics and ideas far from his own interests. He championed us within the department; he guided us through the steps of finishing our dissertations; he connected us with the whole world of curators and historians. I can say that even when he disagreed with me, he was deeply supportive of what I was trying to do. That is a unique kind of generosity, and something else that I hope I learned from him.

Having come to Princeton to study the history of photography with Peter, Peter Barberie received his PhD in 2007. In 2003 he began work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in the Department of Prints, Drawings, and Photographs, where since 2008 he has been the Brodsky Curator of Photographs, Alfred Stieglitz Center.