“Suddenly their little voices were silenced…and then we knew.”1
On November 30, 1939, when American photojournalist Thérèse Bonney was in Helsinki, Finland preparing for the 1940 Olympics, the Soviet Army crossed the border with 465,000 soldiers and 1,000 planes and bombed the city. Shocked by the devastation upon its residents, Bonney decided to do something about it. The “something” resulted in her photographing the carnage wrought on the people of Helsinki, especially the mothers and children.

Bonney’s heart-breaking photographs of Finland as well as those from other European countries taking during World War II soon appeared in international newspapers and magazines. But news stories were so easily forgotten, so in 1940 Bonney published a photo-essay book War Comes to the People. That same year the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan hosted an exhibition of those images. Her photos moved Franklin Roosevelt to send $10 million in aid and Winston Churchill lifted the Atlantic Blockade so Red Cross ships could deliver help to the victims.

Bonney had been well known since 1924 as the founder of the first American illustrated press service, which initially specialized in stories and photos about European design and architecture. “I have made my headquarters in France since 1918, but I am not an expatriate. I am the dean of the American press corps in Paris. Nobody outdates me,” she proudly told a reporter later in life. Despite Bonney’s long residence in France and newspaper clients in over twenty countries, she was especially concerned about the United States. In The Invention of Chic: Therese Bonney and Paris Moderne, she said, “Our offices, our cars, our clothes reflect modern life, but our furniture and our homes are of the past,” she said, hoping to educate her homeland about European art, fashion, and architecture.

Born Mabel Thérèse Bonney to Anthony Le Roy and Addie Bonnie on July 15, 1894, in Syracuse, New York, she moved with her mother when she was five to California. In 1916 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of California, Berkeley and a master’s degree the following year from Radcliffe College. Between 1918 and 1919 Bonney studied at the Sorbonne and in 1921 received a docteur des lettres, becoming the youngest person and the fourth woman to earn a degree there. When she completed her doctoral thesis on the “Ethical Ideas on the Theater of Alexandre Dumas” she attracted attention in the Parisian press. “The people treated me like Pocahontas. They trailed me around everywhere and called me ‘La Belle et Grand Américaine,’” she recalled in a New York Times interview in 1976.

Bonney was not only brilliant but so striking that famous artists like Raoul Dufy and Georges Rouault painted her portrait. Before long she was directing the first international program to send French students to the United States. Yet Bonney was restless, so she started taking photographs of the artists, writers, and designers with whom she had become friends, including Gertrude Stein and Joan Miro.

After Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland and the USSR’s attack upon Finland, Bonney began “truth raids” to photograph the widespread destruction caused by war. “I go forth alone, try to get the truth and then bring it back and try to make others face it and do something about it” she later told a reporter.

In 1943 Bonney collected other images of the war’s victims in her photojournalism book Europe’s Children. “With my camera I have made this record in France, Spain, England, Sweden and Finland,” she wrote in the introduction. (18) Disturbing photographs of war’s effect upon the young were interspersed with Bonney’s sparse prose such as, “It was not so long ago…the children of Europe led happy lives of home — and play, then — war was declared.” Later in the book she writes, “In wind and rain they beg — they search for food” and “Larders empty ‘no bread — useless to insist’ chalked on bakery doors.” Included, too, were portraits of women: “The mothers of Europe — this woman only forty — like pelicans, have given all to feed their little ones.”

The collection was so powerful that it not only inspired the 1947 MGM movie The Search but also led to the creation of UNICEF.

In the post-war years, Finland awarded Bonney the Order of the White Rose. France decorated her with the Croix de Guerre and the Legion of Honor. But awards meant less to Bonney than action. She provisioned food and supplies to an Alsatian village left in shambles and paid lycee tuition for the son of a vineyard keeper, enabling the youth to subsequently attend college and graduate school.

As she aged and witnessed discrimination toward older adults, the feisty photojournalist returned to the Sorbonne to acquire a second doctorate on the aged. She also lobbied in Washington to have Medicare benefits extended to Americans living outside the United States.
In the 1976 New York Times interview, reporter Nan Robertson asked Bonney about her life, and the photojournalist modestly replied that she thought it “could be an inspiration to the young.” On January 15, 1978, she died of heart failure at the American Hospital in Paris.
Art history researcher Caroline Riley observed in 2021, “Bonney’s trail-blazing life had a dramatic impact on the progress of women in the male-dominated professions of photographer, journalist, spy, business owner, and curator.”
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Comments
Ms. Bonney did so much, and so much good, she makes the argument of “yes” being the answer to the question ‘can a person be in more than one place at the same time?’