Synopses & Reviews
Try to picture Mark Twain, or Uncle Remus, or even TheodoreRoosevelt. More than likely, you have a Frances Benjamin Johnston image in yourmind. Johnston was a significant--and arresting--figure in early twentieth-centuryphotography. Beautifully illustrated with forty examples of her work, this firstfull-length biography explores the surprising range of Johnston's talent, as well asher high-stepping, controversialcharacter.
Johnston produced a good deal of theusual society portraiture of the time--including a nude photograph of a debutantethat prompted the girl's outraged father to file a lawsuit--but she was also animportant photodocumentarian. Students of African American history can reexaminelife at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) or Tuskegee using hundreds ofphotographs made by Johnston at the turn of the lastcentury.
Through Johnston's work we can seeAdmiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the Roosevelt children playing withtheir pet pony at the White House, and the gardens of Edith Wharton's famous villanear Paris. Johnston's major project on early vernacular architecture of theAmerican South preserves scores of buildings that no longer exist except on herfilm.
However, while many are familiar withJohnston's photographs, most know little about the woman who made them. And withoutthe context of her life, which Bettina Berch gives us in all its contradiction andcolor, Johnston's subjects may seem inchoate, her choices part feminist and partreactionary, part radical and partretrograde.
Johnston entered photography when thefield was relatively new, and professional gender boundaries were still beingdefined. The invention of lighter equipment and changing technologies in developingmeant that photography could be moved from the studio and darkroom--maleprovinces--out into the street or the home. But the repressiveness of latenineteenth-century society sometimes cast a shadow: there were a host ofprescriptions governing proper female behavior, and certainly the sensuality of thehuman body as a subject caused many to argue that this new art form should remain amale preserve.
Within these boundaries, Johnstondefined herself as an artist. Raised in an upper-middle-class household inWashington, D.C., she declined to marry money and instead made her living as anartist, although she enjoyed the cushion of her family's wealth and connections. Inthe course of her career, she moved through a series of interests, from portraitureto historic preservation. It is her restlessness, her resistance to easycategorizing, that makes this upper-class bohemian photographer such a fascinatingsubject herself.