The remarkable selection of photographs offered in this auction as lots 203 through 240 comes from the collection of Peter C. Bunnell (1937-2021), the pioneering curator, teacher, and photographic historian. All of the sale’s proceeds will be distributed to six institutions with whom Bunnell was associated — Rochester Institute of Technology, Ohio University, Yale University, The George Eastman Museum, The Museum of Modern Art, and Princeton University Art Museum — to establish endowments to support the study of photographic history.
Bunnell began his long career in photography as a student of Minor White’s at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the 1950s, and was recruited by White to work on the seminal periodical of artistic photography, Aperture. He joined the staff of The Museum of Modern Art in 1966 as a collection cataloguer, becoming Associate Curator and then Curator of Photography. At MoMA he curated the noteworthy exhibitions Photography as Printmaking (1968), Photography into Sculpture (1970), and the first retrospective of the work of Clarence H. White (1971). In 1972, he was hired as the inaugural David Hunter McAlpin Professor of the History of Photography and Modern Art at Princeton University.
Bunnell served as Director of the Princeton University Art Museum from 1973 to 1978, and as Acting Director from 1998 to 2000, while also being the Museum’s Curator of Photography throughout the entirety of his tenure. Bunnell built a broad-ranging collection of photographs at the Museum, the firsthand examination of which became a central element of the student experience in his classes and seminars. Bunnell also assembled a personal collection of photography over the course of his long career that reflects his vast and deep understanding of the medium. Begun in the 1950s, before photography galleries and dealers were commonplace, Bunnell’s collection is a deeply personal one, put together with a sense of joy and curiosity that includes both icons and lesser-known gems spanning the history of photography.
Bunnell met photographer Jerry Uelsmann during their student days at the Rochester Institute of Technology in the 1950s. The two went on to become lifelong friends and colleagues in the field of photography. Uelsmann’s work, which increasingly involved the practice of incorporating multiple negatives into a single print, dovetailed with Bunnell’s progressive view of photography, and the young curator included the photographer’s work in his seminal 1968 exhibition Photography as Printmaking at The Museum of Modern Art. Bunnell went on to contribute text to the Uelsmann monographs Jerry N. Uelsmann (1970); Silver Meditations (1975), and Museum Studies (1999).
“Uelsmann’s art is essentially direct rather than allusive, and his pictures appear analogous to that believable reality so fundamental to photography. But herein is the rub: Uelsmann’s interpretive vision pervades each work and causes us to ponder whether reality is really quite so true as invention.”
—Peter C. Bunnell
Silver Meditations (1975) Provenance
Gift of the photographer, 1984
Collection of Peter C. Bunnell, Princeton, New JerseyLiterature
Uelsmann, Jerry Uelsmann: Photo Synthesis, p. 68
Uelsmann, Jerry Uelsmann: Other Realities, p. 30-31
Uelsmann, Uelsmann Untitled: A Retrospective, p. 165
A Reverence for Beauty: The Peter C. Bunnell Collection, Part 2
205
Lot offered with No Reserve
Untitled (cube above water)
1980
Gelatin silver print, printed no later than 1984.
10 1/2 x 13 in. (26.7 x 33 cm)
Signed, titled, dated in pencil, copyright credit stamp with date in ink on the verso; initialed and dated in pencil on the mat; signed, dated, inscribed 'For my old pal Peter with friendly thoughts, Jerry 1984' in ink and copyright credit stamp with date in ink on the reverse of the mat.
Estimate
$3,000 - 5,000 •
Sold for $1,905
Sarah Krueger
Head of Department, Photographs
skrueger@phillips.com
Vanessa Hallett
Worldwide Head of Photographs and Chairwoman, Americas
vhallett@phillips.com
Photographs
New York Auction 4 April 2023
