Background
Barbara (Bobbie) Pugh Norfleet was born on February 18, 1926, in Lakewood, New Jersey, United States. She was the daughter of Joseph Pugh and Henriette (Plangere) Norfleet.
Harvard University
Swarthmore College
Barbara (Bobbie) Pugh Norfleet was born on February 18, 1926, in Lakewood, New Jersey, United States. She was the daughter of Joseph Pugh and Henriette (Plangere) Norfleet.
Barbara Norfleet graduated from Swarthmore College in 1947 with an economics major and in 1957 received a Doctor of Philosophy from Harvard University in Social Psychology.
In 1952 Barbara Norfleet taught a course at Harvard in Statistics and then left Harvard to raise her three sons. She returned to Harvard in 1960 to co-teach a course with David Riesman entitled "American Character and Social Structure." In 1970 she audited the introductory photography studio course taught by Len Gittleman which precipitated her career shift to photography and curation. In 1971 Barbara Norfleet moved to the Visual and Environmental Study Department at Harvard and taught a popular studio course "Photography As Sociological Description" and later a lecture course "America Seen." She became curator of the Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts and with a grant from NEH to collect and organize a photographic archive exploring the social history of the U.S.
Barbara Norfleet retired from Harvard University in 2001 having published seven books on her curatorial work as well as six books and portfolios on her own photographic work including Manscape with Beasts (1990), The Illusion of Orderly Progress (1999), and Aesthetics of Defense (2006).
Quotes from others about the person
Writer Bill Kowenhoven said of Norfleet after he interviewed her in 1998: "As a teacher of social psychology and sociology at Harvard, she has brought her own squirrel soul to photography and to Harvard’s Archive of American Social History which she began. She leaps from branch to branch of seemingly divergent aspects of photography and criticism yet maintains balance, grace, and connectedness that leads always to a cohesive body of work."
Barbara Norfleet married Alfred Cohn in 1951.