by Gerald Boerner
We focus on a very special photographer today. Not only was Frances Benjamin Johnston an careful photography, but she was a woman. In the time that she worked, the late 19th century and the early 20th century, most women in the photography field did their work under the name of their husbands. There were some exceptions, of course, like Julia Margaret Cameron in the UK. It was difficult enough for African-American men to gain recognition in photography, but to be woman photographer was a unique accomplishment. She was born into a family where her mother was a White House correspondent, trained in Paris, and a skilled photographer of both portraits and architecture.
Please Note: In the original version of this posting I incorrectly identified Ms. Johnston as an African-American woman photographer. Upon checking out the details after I was alerted to the fact that she may not be Black, I verified that I had incorrectly made the assumption that she was a person of color; I apologize for that error. She still deserves praise as an outstanding woman photographer. GLB
“Well-behaved women rarely make history.”
— Laurel Thatcher Ulrich, of Johnston’s business choices
“A photograph is always invisible, it is not it that we see.”
— Roland Barthes
“I have discovered photography. Now I can kill myself. I have nothing else to learn.”
— Pablo Picasso
“Senseless photographers practice random acts of beauty; intelligent photographers practice consistent acts of selflessness.”
— Author Unknown
“…one of the first women to make photography a career in the late 1800′s and early 1900′s, when it was still very much a man’s business…as all business was.”
— Katie Ring
“…the most grandiose result of the photographic enterprise is to give us the sense that we can hold the whole world in our heads—as an anthology of images.”
— Susan Sontag
“The crude creations of mortal thought must finally give place to the glorious forms which we sometimes behold in the camera of divine Mind, where the mental picture is spiritual and eternal.”
— Mary Baker Eddy
“Just as a fisherman cannot catch fish unless his line is in the water, a wildlife photographer cannot shoot great wildlife images unless he or she is out there with camera in hand and the knowledge of what to do then the ‘magnificent moment’ occurs.”
— George H. Harrison
Women Photographers: Frances Benjamin Johnston
Frances "Fannie" Benjamin Johnston (1864 – 1952) was one of the earliest American female photographers and photojournalists.
The only surviving child of wealthy and well connected parents, she was raised in Washington D.C. and studied at the Académie Julian in Paris and the Washington Students League. An independent and strong willed young woman, she wrote articles for periodicals before finding her creative outlet through photography after she was given her first camera by George Eastman, a close friend of the family, and inventor of the new, lighter, Eastman Kodak cameras. She received training in photography and dark room techniques from Thomas Smillie, director of photography at the Smithsonian.
She took portraits of friends, family and local figures before working as a freelance photographer and touring Europe in the 1890s, using her connection to Smillie to visit prominent photographers and gather items for the museum’s collections. She gained further practical experience in her craft by working for the newly formed Eastman Kodak company in Washington D.C. forwarding film for development and advising customers when cameras needed repairs. She opened her own photographic studio in Washington D.C. in 1895, taking portraits of many famous contemporaries including Susan B. Anthony, Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington. Well connected among elite society, she was commissioned by magazines to do ‘celebrity’ portraits and was dubbed the "Photographer to the American court." She photographed Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the Roosevelt children playing with their pet pony at the White House and the gardens of Edith Wharton’s famous villa near Paris.
Her mother, Frances Antoinette Johnston, had been a congressional journalist for the Baltimore Sun and her daughter built on her familiarity with the Washington political scene by becoming official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, "TR" Roosevelt, and Taft presidential administrations.
Johnston also photographed the famous American heiress and literary salon socialite Natalie Barney in Paris but perhaps her most famous work, shown opposite, is her self portrait of the liberated ‘New Woman’, petticoats showing and beer stein in hand. Johnston was a constant advocate for the role of women in the burgeoning art of photography. The Ladies Home Journal published Johnston’s article "What a Woman Can Do With a Camera" in 1897 and she co-curated (with Zaida Ben-Yusuf) an exhibition of photographs by twenty-eight women photographers at the 1900 Exposition Universelle, which afterwards travelled to Saint Petersburg, Moscow, and Washington, DC. She traveled widely in her thirties, taking a wide range of documentary and artistic photographs of coal miners, iron workers, women in New England’s mills and sailors being tattooed on board ship as well as her society commissions.
In 1899, she gained further notability when she was commissioned by Hollis Burke Frissell to photograph the buildings and students of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia in order to show its success. This series, documenting the ordinary life of the school, remains as some of her most telling work. It was displayed at the Exposé nègre of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900.
She photographed events such as world’s fairs and peace-treaty signings and took the last portrait of President William McKinley, at the Pan American Exposition of 1901 just before his assassination. With her partner, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a successful freelance home and garden photographer in her own right, she opened a studio in New York in 1913. They produced a series of studies of New York architecture through the 1920s.
In the 1920s she became increasingly interested in photographing architecture, motivated by a desire to document buildings and gardens which were falling into disrepair or about to be redeveloped and lost. Her photographs remain an important resource for modern architects, historians and conservationists. She exhibited a series of 247 photographs of Fredericksburg, Virginia, from the decaying mansions of the rich to the shacks of the poor, in 1928. The exhibit was titled "Pictorial Survey–Old Fredericksburg, Virginia–Old Falmouth and Nearby Places" and described as "A Series of Photographic Studies of the Architecture of the Region Dating by Tradition from Colonial Times to Circa 1830" as "An Historical Record and to Preserve Something of the Atmosphere of An Old Virginia Town."
Publicity from the display prompted the University of Virginia to hire her to document its buildings and the state of North Carolina to record its architectural history. Louisiana hired Johnston to document its huge inventory of rapidly deteriorating plantations and she was given a grant in 1933 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to document Virginia’s early architecture. This led to a series of grants and photographs of eight other southern states, all of which were given to the Library of Congress for public use. Johnston was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects for her work in preserving old and endangered buildings and her collections have been purchased by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although her relentless traveling was curtailed by petrol rationing in the Second World War the tireless Johnston continued to photograph until her death in New Orleans at age eighty-eight.
"Johnston was an early photo-journalist and a noted freelance photographer; she was one of the first American women to achieve prominence as a photographer. Trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, she studied photography upon her return to Washington, D.C., in the mid-1880 and opened a professional studio circa 1890. Her family’s social position gave
Miss Johnston access to the First Family and leading Washington political figures and launched her career as a photojournalist and portrait photographer. One of her scoops as a correspondent for the Bain News Service was to board Admiral Dewey’s flagship with a letter of introduction from Theodore Roosevelt and interview the "Hero of Manila Bay" en route from the Philippines. Johnston’s documentary work was exemplary and included a renowned series of photographs commissioned by Booker T. Washington for the Hampton Institute in 1899 and the Tuskegee Institute in 1906. While she specialized in the photos of the powerful and elite she also on occasion did scenes of workers and working class life about 1905 she did a remarkable series of photographs depicting mechanics and laborers at work at the Naval Gun Factory."
Today the Library of Congress is the principal repository of the writings and photographs of Frances Benjamin Johnston. She was one of the first contributors to the Library’s Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture and executed a systematic survey of southern architecture with the support of the Carnegie Corporation."
— John Sharp
Book: The Woman Behind the Lens
Johnston produced a good deal of the usual society portraiture of the time–including a nude photograph of a debutante that prompted the girl’s outraged father to file a lawsuit–but she was also an important photodocumentarian. Students of African American history can reexamine life at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) or Tuskegee using hundreds of photographs made by Johnston at the turn of the last century.
Through Johnston’s work we can see Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the Roosevelt children playing with their pet pony at the White House, and the gardens of Edith Wharton’s famous villa near Paris. Johnston’s major project on early vernacular architecture of the American South preserves scores of buildings that no longer exist except on her film.
However, while many are familiar with Johnston’s photographs, most know little about the woman who made them. And without the context of her life, which Bettina Berch gives us in all its contradiction and color, Johnston’s subjects may seem inchoate, her choices part feminist and part reactionary, part radical and part retrograde.
References:
Deborah Willis. (2002) Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present. W.W. Norton & Co.
Background and biographical information is from Wikipedia articles on:
Wikipedia: Frances Benjamin Johnston…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frances_Benjamin_Johnston
Web Sites and Blogs:
Katie Ring… Photography and Life: Frances Benjamin Johnston…
http://katiering.blogspot.com/2009/07/frances-benjamin-johnston.html
University of Virginia Press: The Woman Behind the Lens…
http://www.upress.virginia.edu/books/berch.html
Better Photo: Photographer Quotes…
http://www.google.com/search?q=Minoriity+photographers+quotes&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a
Comments