Gail Buckland is an author, educator, curator and authority on photography.

Gail Buckland, former curator of the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain, taught history of photography at The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art for forty-two years. Before her retirement she was the Benjamin Menschel Distinguished Visiting Professor and prior to that the Olympus Chair in the History of Photography the Cooper Union. She also held the Nobel Chair in Art and Cultural History at Sarah Lawrence College and taught at Columbia College, Chicago and Pratt Institute, Brooklyn.

Buckland is the curator of numerous exhibitions [see "EXHIBITION"'] including the traveling exhibitions “Who Shot Rock and Roll: A Photographic History, 1955-Present” and “Who Shot Sports: A Photographic History, 1845 to the Present,” both opening at the Brooklyn Museum and traveling to numerous museums across the United States and abroad (see “PRESS”); “The Photographer and the City at the Museum of Contemporary Art,” Chicago (1977); the landmark “Fox Talbot and the Invention of Photography” at the Pierpont Morgan Library (1979); “Cecil Beaton War Photographs” at the Imperial War Museum, London (1981); “Shanties to Skyscrapers: The Photographs of Robert L. Bracklow” (1983) and “Visions of Liberty” (1985) both at the New-York Historical Society, the later mounted in celebration of the Statue’s centennial; and “Shots in the Dark: True Crime Pictures” at the Chelsea Art Museum (2003). The first exhibition she helped organize was “From Today Painting is Dead: The Beginnings of Photography” at the Victoria and Albert Museum (1972).

The Annenberg Space for Photography in Los Angeles, which hosted “Who Shot Rock & Roll” in 2012, commissioned Stephen Kochones of Arclight Productions, to make “Who Shot Rock & Roll: The Film (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nEPguQXQ3XA).” Buckland was the content advisor as well as providing on screen commentary.

She is the author or collaborator on sixteen books of photography and history (see BOOKS). Buckland has written the introductions to numerous books and the text for exhibition catalogues, including UFO by Albert Watson, Jacques Henri Lartigue L’empreinte du bonheur, Nevada by Jonas Dovydenas, Visions in the Dark: Camera Obscura, and The American Experiment by Brandon Ralph. Among her magazine articles are two for special issues of American Heritage: Overrated & Underrated (September 2001) and America Unabridged (November-December 2004) for which she contributed the essay “Indispensable Photographs.”

The American Century, by Harold Evans with Gail Buckland and Kevin Baker, with more than 900 exceptional photographs discovered by Buckland, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and a Publishers’ Weekly Editors’ Choice. 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, published by Little Brown (2004). Both book and television series were supported by a prestigious Sloan Foundation grant. She also collaborated with Evans on the Court T.V. program Shots in the Dark and on her book of the same title for which Evans wrote the introductory commentary.

Buckland served as photographic consultant for Al Gore’s PowerPoint, film and book, An Inconvenient Truth.  Prior to An Inconvenient Truth, Buckland collaborated with Al and Tipper Gore on their book The Spirit of Family along with Katy Homans.

Buckland served on the Advisory Board of No Longer Empty, the non-profit art organization that brought site specific art into empty buildings in the five boroughs of New York City and advised on the book by Manon Slome, No Longer Empty: Building Art and Community in Unused Spaces. She is a member of many art and cultural organizations both nationally and internationally.

A personal essay about her evolution as a photographic historian, curator, educator and author appears in Photo Soup 4 (2026) edited by Alison Nordstrom and Diana Stoll.

Buckland divides her time between the Hudson Valley, New York and Brooklyn, New York.