My time at the Center provided an essential period of research, intellectual exchange, and methodological refinement for my current book project, under contract with University of California Press, on the syndicated photographer and cultural intermediary Thérèse Bonney (1894–1978). My research critically examined her three-decade photographic practice, which spans subjects from wartime devastation and concentration camps to architectural interiors, haute couture, and Nazi-looted art. The Center provided the scholarly environment necessary to advance this large-scale archival project. 

Comprising tens of thousands of photographs, thousands of articles, and scrapbooks documenting circulation, Bonney’s archive at Berkeley’s Bancroft Library offers an unprecedented opportunity to reconstruct the global networks through which her images moved. Her syndication model operated across 19 countries and reached publications in 33 nations, constructing what I describe as a global visual lexicon of modernity. Her portrait of the famed art dealer Ambroise Vollard (1866–1939) scowling behind his desk, with mountains of papers around him, visualizes this ostensibly transparent logistical coordination. During my residency, I refined my methodology by integrating close visual analysis with large-scale data approaches, enabling me to move between detailed readings of individual images and broader patterns of circulation.

The Center’s community was instrumental in advancing my methodological synthesis. Conversations with fellows across disciplines clarified the broader stakes of my contribution to debates on circulation, authorship, and the infrastructure of visual knowledge. These exchanges enabled me to refine the concept of intermedial syndication, which I use to describe how images operate across time, distance, and media platforms. I deepened my analysis of the infrastructures, including steamship routes and airmail, that shaped Bonney’s practice of physically moving her negatives, photographs, captions, and articles. These networks determined not only the movement of images but also their reception, situating Bonney’s work within a broader history of technological acceleration and global standardization.

Despite the challenges posed by the government shutdown, I was able to consolidate my conceptual framework and developed the argument that, for Bonney, modernism was embedded within communication systems, producing a visual nomenclature that shaped how new cultural categories were understood. For example, Bonney’s portrait of Titaÿna (1897–1966) illustrating the pictorial route of her 1928 book Mon tour du monde transforms the rationalizing structures of global travel into a more experimental, even absurdist, visual logic. By reconstructing how exhibitions, photographic series, press syndication, and archival preservation operated together during the first half of the 20th century, the project shifts the object of art-historical analysis from the individual work to the networks that render works legible.

My research further revealed how Bonney’s photographic practice mapped the production ecologies underlying modern design. Her sequential images of artists such as Alexander Calder (1898–1976) emphasize seriality, naming practices, and attention to process, while tracing the interdependence of craft and display. Ateliers, millinery tables, and decorative arts workshops emerge as sites where labor generated the visual grammars that later appear polished and seamless in her syndicated images. Even large production centers such as Sèvres become legible as assemblages of specialized skills. In this sense, Bonney documents not only objects but the systems of labor and production that sustain them.

More broadly, my research challenges conventional distinctions between exhibitions, photography, and the press. Bonney’s archive demonstrates that these are not discrete domains but interconnected layers of a single operating system that converts cultural material into authority. This system can be understood as a stack: Each layer—capture, formatting, distribution, reception, and archiving—depends on the previous one while generating inputs for the next. Through this framework, modern visual culture emerges as a process through which objects and events are transformed into durable regimes of cultural and political meaning. This perspective reshapes our understanding of Bonney’s wartime photography. Her images of destruction and displacement derive their force in part from their disruption of the visual order established by her earlier work. Interiors no longer stabilize identity, clothing no longer orders social meaning, and objects no longer guarantee permanence. Indeed, her wartime images expose the fragility of stabilizing systems, revealing the slippage underlying modern visual culture.

In sum, my time at the Center was transformative. It enabled me to deepen my engagement with Bonney’s archive, refine a hybrid methodological approach, and articulate more clearly the project’s broader scholarly contributions. By historicizing the infrastructures that underpin visual culture, my research offers a genealogy for understanding how images continue to shape public knowledge, affect, and political alignment.

University of California, Davis
Paul Mellon Visiting Senior Fellow, September–October 2025

I am continuing work on my book project alongside guest teaching, research travel, and writing for an upcoming publication on photographer Marjorie Collins.