She settled in Paris and studied at the Sorbonne from 1918–1919, publishing a thesis on the moral ideas in the theater of Alexandre Dumas, père.

[1] After graduation she received multiple sources of financial aid, including the Horatio Stebbins Scholarship; the Belknap, Baudrillart, and Billy Fellowships; and the Carl Schurz Memorial Foundation Oberländer grant in 1936, which allowed her to study German contributions to the history of photography.

An ardent self-publicist, Bonney acquired the images directly from the Salon exhibitions, stores, manufacturers, architects, and designers of furniture, ceramics, jewelry, and other applied arts as well as architecture.

She sold the photographic prints to various client-subscribers primarily in the U.S. (a small-effort precursor to today's illustrated news agency) and charged fees for reproduction rights in a more traditional manner.

A collection of the images were shown at The Museum of Modern Art in New York City in 1940 and later published in her 1943 book Europe's Children.

Toward the end of her life, Bonney donated her estate of furniture to her Alma mater in Berkeley, California, and photographs and negatives — many duplicates of one another — to a number of other institutions in the U.S. and France.

In the U.S., approximately 4,000 vintage photographic prints were donated to the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum in New York City, initially organized in the 1990s with funds from the Smithsonian Institution Women's Council (SIWC) by archivist Mel Byars.

Some 6,200 photographs are held by the Photography Collection of the New York Public Library, including large numbers of images from Finland.