Gail Buckland

Gail Buckland is an author, educator, curator and authority on photography. She is the author or collaborator on sixteen books of photography and history.

A graduate of the University of Rochester, Buckland is a Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Cooper Union, New York City. In 1991 she held the Nobel Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College. She has also taught at Columbia College, Chicago and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

The Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, where Buckland served as curator in the 1970s, awarded Professor Buckland their prestigious J. Dudley Johnston Award for “major achievement in photographic criticism or history” and “sustained excellence.” While living and working in England, Buckland organized many exhibitions at the Royal Photographic Society and assisted in organizing the groundbreaking 1972 exhibition at the Victoria and Albert Museum, “From Today Painting is Dead”.

Two of Gail Buckland’s earliest books are “Reality Recorded: Early Documentary Photography” and the one she co-authored with Cecil Beaton, “The Magic Image: The Genius of Photography from 1839 to the Present”. Other exhibitions and books include “Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography” at the Pierpont Morgan Library; “Cecil Beaton War Photographs” at the Imperial War Museum, London; “Shots in the Dark: True Crime Pictures” at the Chelsea Art Museum; and “Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955 to the Present” and “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History 1843 to the Present”, both organized by the Brooklyn Museum and published by Knopf.

The best-selling “The American Century” by Harold Evans (in which she was a collaborator along with author and historian Kevin Baker)contains more than 900 exceptional photographs. She again worked with Harold Evans and David Lefer on their book and WGBH television series, “They Made America From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine: Two Hundred Years of Innovators”.

To mark the 50th anniversary of American Heritage magazine in 2004, the editors selected Gail Buckland, above all other writers and historians of photography, to choose the “Ten Most Indispensable Photographs” in American history.

Al and Tipper Gore invited Gail Buckland and Katy Homans to work with them a photographic book, “The Spirit of Family”, depicting the changing face of the American family.

Gail Buckland served as photographic consultant to former Vice-President Al Gore on his PowerPoint presentation, documentary and book “An Inconvenient Truth”.