Estelle Jussim

Early life and education Jussim was born on March 18, 1927, in Manhattan, New York, the daughter of Boris and Manya (Glusker) Jussim. She later earned a Doctorate of Library Service from Columbia University. Her lecture at the Amon Carter Museum formed the basis of her 1983 book Frederic Remington, the Camera, and the Old West. Linköping University in Sweden awarded her an honorary doctorate in 1990.

Scholarship Jussim wrote on the history and criticism of photography, drawing on postmodern, deconstructionist, and feminist perspectives.

Books Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts (1974) examined the development of photographic technologies and their cultural implications. Scholar Susan O. Thompson described it as "ground-breaking." The book was discussed in Art Journal alongside the work of William M. Ivins Jr. and André Malraux, and was cited as a standard reference in Victorian Periodicals Review.

Slave to Beauty: The Eccentric Life and Controversial Career of F. Holland Day (1981) examined the life and work of F. Holland Day within the cultural and artistic contexts of his time. Reviewing the book in Artforum, Kelly Wise described it as "an appealing biography" and praised Jussim's treatment of the rivalry between Day and Alfred Stieglitz as "mischievous and entertaining." John Raeburn, in Environmental Review, called it "an essential book for anyone interested in how photographs convey ideas about the natural environment." Kenneth I. Helphand, in Design Book Review, situated the book within contemporary landscape scholarship.

Other scholarship Jussim's 1977 article "The Research Uses of Visual Information," published in Library Trends, distinguished between visual information and visual communication, and between "search" and "research" as modes of inquiry. Writing in The American Archivist in 2004, Joan M. Schwartz cited the article as foundational to the field and listed Jussim alongside Victor Burgin, Richard Bolton, and Barbara Maria Stafford as a key figure in visual materials scholarship.

Jussim contributed essays, introductions, and forewords to major exhibition catalogues, monographs, and anthologies published by institutions including the Friends of Photography, the Walker Art Center, the Center for Creative Photography, and Aperture. Her essays appeared alongside those of Beaumont Newhall, Nathan Lyons, Naomi Rosenblum, Alan Trachtenberg, and Van Deren Coke.

In 1984 the Walker Art Center invited Jussim as one of six scholars to participate in the Image and Message lecture series, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities and directed by John Schott, held in conjunction with the exhibition The 20th-Century Poster: Design of the Avant-Garde. Her essay "The Self-Reflexive Camera" (1989) was anthologized in Photography: 1900 to the Present (Prentice Hall, 1998). She contributed "Images of Apocalypse," a review essay on survivor drawings of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings, to the Boston Review in 1981.

Publications Books Visual Communication and the Graphic Arts: Photographic Technologies in the Nineteenth Century (R.R. Bowker, 1974; reprinted with revised preface, 1983) Slave to Beauty: The Eccentric Life and Controversial Career of F. Holland Day (D.R. Godine, 1981) Frederic Remington, the Camera, and the Old West (Amon Carter Museum, 1983) Stopping Time: The Photographs of Harold Edgerton (Harry N. Abrams, 1987) The Eternal Moment: Essays on the Photographic Image (Aperture, 1989)

Mothers and Daughters: That Special Quality: An Exploration in Photography (Aperture Foundation, 1989, co-edited with Tillie Olsen and Julie Olsen Edwards)

Selected articles "The Research Uses of Visual Information," Library Trends 25, no. 4 (1977): 763–778 "Images of Apocalypse," Boston Review (1981) Honorary doctorate, Linköping University, Sweden, 1990 New York Historical Society prize for distinctive achievement in the history of photography, for Slave to Beauty Estelle Jussim Award for the Visual Arts, established in her name by the School of Library and Information Science at Simmons University