Background

Frances Benjamin Johnston was born on January 15, 1864 in Grafton, West Virginia, United States. She was the daughter of Anderson Donophon and Frances Antoinette (Benjamin) Johnston.

Education

After attending Notre-Dame Convent, Govanston, Maryland, she studied painting and drawing at the Academie Julien, Paris (1883-85), then at the Art Students League in Washington, D.C. She served an apprenticeship with Dr. Thomas William Smillie, director of the Smithsonian Institution's Photography Division.

Career

Frances Johnston first worked as a magazine correspondent, ca. 1889, illustrating her articles first with her drawings, then later with her photographs. Her many commissions included photographing the Washington, D.C., school system for the Paris Exposition of 1900, Admiral Dewey's victorious return from Manila (in Naples), construction of the New Theatre in New York (1909), the architecture of Fredericksburg, Virginia, and its environs (1927) and numerous important buildings and homes of wealth.

In the early 1890s Frances Johnston opened a portrait studio in Washington, D.C., and around the turn of the century took on a partner for a few years, Mattie Edward Hewitt. Johnston was the unofficial White House photographer through the administrations of Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft. She also traveled widely and continued to write for such publications as Lester's Magazine and Town and Country.

Works

More photos

• book

  • The Hampton album: 44 photographs from an album of Hampton Institute 1966
  • Mammoth Cave by Flash-Light: Reprinted from Demorest's Family Magazine
  • The Early Architecture of North Carolina: A Pictorial Survey by Frances Benjamin Johnston, with an Architectural History by Thomas Tileston Waterman 1941
  • A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1889-1910 1974
  • Frances Benjamin Johnston: 40+ Photographic Reproductions - Women Photographer

• photography

  • George Washington Carver (front row, center) poses with fellow faculty of Tuskegee Institute

    1902

  • Signing of the Protocol

    (Marking the cessation of hostilities between the US and C...)

  • Alice Roosevelt's

    (wedding photograph )

    1906

  • Natalie Clifford Barney

    (between ca. 1890 and ca. 1910)

  • Self-portrait by Johnston, dressed as a man, sporting a fake mustache and holding a bicycle

    1890

  • Self Portrait (as New Woman), an 1896 self-portrait taken in her Washington, DC studio

  • Three-quarter length portrait of educator Daniel Coit Gilman

    1890

  • Booker T. Washington

    1895

  • Ava Lowle Willing

  • First Lady Edith Roosevelt

Membership

Frances Johnston was an out-of-town member of the New York Camera Club and an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects (1945). She joined clubs: Women's National Press, Arts (Washington).

Personality

Quotes from others about the person

• Ann Tucker in The Woman's Eye notes: "Even if her photographs were not as beautiful as they unquestionably are, her careful, expansive documentation of the events and customs of her day would be invaluable to historians."

Connections

Father:

Anderson Donophon Johnston

Mother:

Frances Antoinette (Benjamin) Johnston

References

• Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Hampton Album What became known as the Hampton Album - comprised of 159 luxurious platinum plates that offer insight into the daily life of students, originally exhibited in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris - is Johnston’s signature work, and a touchstone for contemporary artists and historians. The leatherbound album was discovered serendipitously by Lincoln Kirstein in a Washington, DC, bookstore during World War II, and donated to MoMA in 1965. This volume makes the album available to the public in its entirety for the first time and features a contextualizing essay by curator Sarah Hermanson Meister and a response to the album from artist LaToya Ruby Frazier.
  2019
• Macmillan Biographical Encyclopedia of Photographic Artists and Innovators
  1983