Frances Benjamin Johnston

On 6 January 1898, the US National Museum acquired ‘pictorial studies’ by Frederick Hollyer, W. A. Martin, Henry Peach Robinson, Oscar Rejlander, and Julia Margaret Cameron, in a group of sixty-nine photographs that included many illustrations of new and old technical processes such as paper prints, paper negatives, a Talbotype, carbon prints, glass transparencies, ‘color specimens’, and Woodburytypes. The group also included portraits of noted photographers, such as Robinson, Rejlander, Adam Salomon, Dr Hugh Diamond, Francis Bedford, and Reverend E. Bradley (better known as Cuthbert Hede).1 These images came to the museum thanks to Frances Benjamin Johnston, art photographer, journalist, and one-time student of Thomas W. Smillie, who visited London in the summer and fall of 1897 (figures 1-3). Johnston's documentary study of the Hampton Institute has earned her a permanent place in the history of photography; her contemporaries also knew and admired her contributions to photography as a fine art.2 Johnston's correspondence (now at the Library of Congress) tells a great deal about this trip, and about the photographer herself, who had a real talent for friendship, great ambition, and an ability to move through the hotly contested territory of the photographic world without scorching her skirts

Art · Art history · Friendship · History of photography · Negative · Painting · Performance art · Photography · Portrait · Sociology · Visual arts · Historical Art and Culture Studies · Photography and Visual Culture