BONNEY, THRSE

born 1894?, Syracuse, N.Y., U.S. died Jan. 15, 1978, Paris, France in full Mabel Thrse Bonney American photographer and writer, remembered chiefly for her pictures portraying the ravages of World War II in Europe. Bonney grew up in New York and California. She graduated from the University of California, took a master's degree in Romance languages at Harvard University, and after a short time at Columbia University completed her doctorate of letters at the Sorbonne in Paris. In 1919 she founded the European branch of the American Red Cross Correspondence Exchange. Later she established the Bonney Service, an illustrated press service supplying feature stories to the press of 33 countries. In 1929 Bonney and an older sister collaborated on a series of guidebooks to antiques, shops, and restaurants in Paris and on a French cookbook. During this period she accumulated a magnificent collection of early photographs, and in 1932 she assembled an exhibit of many of them in Paris under the title The Gay Nineties. The show also traveled to several U.S. cities, and many of the photographs were published in Remember When? (1933). In 1934 she exhibited a collection of daguerreotypes under the title The Second Empire. In that year she was awarded the Legion of Honor for her work on the centenary observation of the death of the marquis de Lafayette. In 1935 she moved to New York City to become director of the new Maison Franaise, a gallery in Rockefeller Center dedicated to fostering better U.S.French cultural understanding. Within a few years, however, Bonney herself took up photography, and in 1939 she published The Vatican. In 1939 she traveled to Finland to photograph preparations for the 1940 Olympic Games, becoming instead the only photojournalist at the scene of the Russian invasion of Finland in November. In 1940 she was in France and was the only foreign journalist present at the battle of the Meuse in June. Her photographs of the war were exhibited at the Library of Congress and across the country. In 1941 Bonney traveled again throughout Europe. Her photos from this trip were published as Europe's Children (1943), a moving, even shocking portrayal of the effects of war. In 1941 she was awarded the Croix de Guerre by the French government. In 1944 the photographs from the first exhibition of her own work were published in book form. After the war she resumed residence in France, where she continued to photograph, wrote a column for Le Figaro, and translated a number of French plays for Broadway production.