BONNIE YOCHELSON

I am an art historian and curator specializing in photography. I have written numerous books about New York photographers, organized exhibitions at art museums, history museums and commercial and non-profit galleries, and was on the faculty of the MFA Department of Photography, Video and Related Media at the School of Visual Arts from 1988 to 2017.

I received an M.A. (1979) and Ph.D. (1985) from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, and worked in the print rooms of the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (on an Andrew Mellon Fellowship) before becoming Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York in 1987. After five years on staff, I became a consultant to the Museum, organizing traveling exhibitions of two of its major collections: the Harry T. Peters Currier & Ives Collection and Berenice Abbott’s “Changing New York” WPA photographs. The latter exhibition, which travelled to three European venues, accompanied a complete catalog of the collection. From 1999 to 2004, I served as consultant to the New-York Historical Society for various collection and exhibition projects.

While at the Museum of the City of New York, I began studying the photographs of Jacob A. Riis, which I returned to intermittently over the years. My work on Riis culminated in a book with historian Daniel Czitrom (2007) and a complete catalog of the collection prepared with the Library of Congress, which owns the bulk of Riis’s papers (2015). I organized Riis exhibitions for the Museum (2015), for two museums in Denmark (2016), and as a traveling exhibition for 24 American venues (2017-2021). These projects were supported primarily with funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Most of my other historical books grew out of work begun as a graduate student on the Clarence H. White School of Photography: Stieglitz New York (2010); Pictorialism Into Modernism: The Clarence H. White School of Photography (1997); and New York to Hollywood: The Photography of Karl Struss (1995). My interest in commercial art photography inspired an exhibition and book on photojournalist Esther Bubley.

I began teaching in the MFA Photo department in 1988, when it was founded by Charles Traub. I taught a seminar on topics in photographic history and museum practice until 2011, when I began teaching a seminar on the photo book with two graphic designers. From 2008 to 2017, I curated the department’s thesis exhibition at SVA’s Chelsea Gallery.

My book on Alice Austen, Too Good to Get Married, will be published by Fordham University Press in 2024. Many thanks to the Gotham Center for New York City History, CUNY Graduate Center, for awarding me a Robert D.L. Gardiner Writing Fellowship in support of the book.