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Michelle Rutan Women’s Images in Western Civilization

Amy Murphy Essay on Frances Benjamin Johnston

Frances Benjamin Johnston an Astute Pioneer in Photography

The standard histories of photography are notable for the lack recognition given to women photographers. Aside from their photographic talent, what is most remarkable about their achievements was their ability to succeed in the face of extraordinary societal and professional odds. They operated at a time when women’s place was truly regarded as being in the home, tending house, children and a husband. They sought to build careers at a time when such an ambition for women was not only frowned upon but also often condemned. Added to all these obstacles was the fact that they were forced to operate in a male-dominated medium. Many of them struggled financially far more than their male counterparts. (Sandler 1)

These women helped change the face of photography. Their sense of independence assisted in overcoming the barriers they faced and obstacles, which in many ways are still confronted by women today. France Benjamin Johnston was one of those women.

Johnston's philosophy on life was full committal to achieving her status as an independent female artist. Her determination guided choices she made in her life such as, choosing not to marry into money as to eliminate the perception that she may be seeking a life of ease. Taking responsibility and determining her future was the foremost aspiration of her life. Johnston's interest in various subjects transitioned her career into many diverse fields. Her photographs consisted of celebrity portraiture, documentary work, estates, gardens, and architectural preservation. Johnston achieved high standards in every field she worked in.

In her time, women's survival in a male dominated photograph profession was in question. Despite this, Frances Benjamin Johnston is to be invariably considered among the world's foremost photographers. Johnston was a prestigious businesswoman and remains one of the nations most influential and successful photographers.

Throughout history women artist and their work tended to be invisible. As Elizabeth Wayland Barber states in her writings very little of ancient literary was recorded about women, so there are few places to research the history of these artistic women. (Barber 23) Reflecting on their prior absence as a meaningful silence within history that updates our own times. Yet it is not the simple fact of a woman’s absence that stimulates our investigation of our existents. The recovery of their work and the sudden recognition of them, question’s the process of our own fascinations: the relation between that woman’s work and the disparate demands of the present. Her history is, then, no longer the disclosure of a lost distant past; it is a relation, a writing and a production of our present. (Fisher 3)

Frances Benjamin Johnston was one of those women who was not invisible she made herself known to people. An only child, she was born in Grafton, West Virginia, in 1864 to wealthy parents Frances Antoinette Benjamin and Anderson Doniphon Johnston. Her father was the head bookkeeper for the Treasury Department and her mom was a professional journalist for the Baltimore Sun and the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, she was the center of the nation’s political whirl. Frances knew her mom’s work very well and admired it. (Berch 11) In the nation's capitol, her parents were active in the high-ranking political and social circles, and their connections, particularly her mother's, would greatly benefit Johnston's education and subsequent career as a photographer.

Frances characterized her upbringing as ambitious and stimulating, living an unconventional life. “I had spent my girlhood in a family circle which bounded the very best of the social, literary and artistic life of the National Capital.” (Berch 10) By growing up in Washington it taught her to go for results by starting at the top.

Johnston drew a great deal of inspiration from the independent female role models in her family: her free-willed Aunt Nin and her mother, her father was reserved and humble, with no brothers in her family or dominant-male-type relatives to corrupt this women-centered mystique. (Berch 12)

Johnston graduated from the Notre Dame Academy near Baltimore in 1884, where she earned the equivalent of a high school diploma. Her parents' connections to the Washington elite enabled her to study art in France, at the prestigious Academie Julien in Paris. She was one of the first women ever to attend the school. For an era often dismissed as intellectually restrictive for women, it is surprising that Frances had such an intense education. (Daniel and Smock 5)

In 1885, she returned to Washington at age 21, planning to make a living as an artist. For a while, she drew illustrations for magazines and sometimes wrote columns. But she soon became more interested in photography because she felt it resulted in more accurate depictions than painting or drawing.

When she took up photography, she first made portraits of friends and family members. Her first camera was received from Eastman Kodak Co. founder George Eastman, a close family friend. She wrote to him asking about his newer, lighter-weight camera, and was given the camera in response. She soon began studying photography under Thomas Smillie at the Smithsonian Institution. Smillie taught the aspiring photographer how to use a camera and work inside a dark room. (Berch 15)

In 1890 she launched and ran an active Washington, D.C. portrait studio she built behind her father’s house in the rose garden where she did most of her portrait work, developed negatives, printed photographs and conducted her business. (Daniel and Smock 17) She soon developed a reputation both as a smart businesswoman and a talented photographer. “The woman makes photography profitable, must have common sense, unlimited patience to carry through endless failures, equally unlimited tact, good taste, a quick eye, and a talent for detail.” (Sandler 33)

Frances also developed a reputation as a freethinking and strong-willed woman. Her independence and bohemian character was well characterized by her famous self-portrait that showed her pulling up her skirt and striking a rather manly pose while drinking a beer and smoking a cigarette. In this way, she helped symbolize the spirit of the "new woman" that was emerging during this period in the country's history. (Sandler 35)

In her portrait sittings Frances Look for curves rather than angles for straight lines, and try to make the interest in the picture center upon what is most effective in her sitter. Some of her famous clients were Booker T. Washington Mark Twain, Theodore Roosevelt and Susan B. Anthony no matter who her subject she worked to bring out their personality and their essence. (Berch 26) Frances’s work shows a comprehensive interest in and concern for humanity, especially for the role of women in American life. (Daniel and Smock 27)

By joining camera clubs it was a way to provide members with useful business connections in which Frances took advantage of throughout the course of her career. Another way of promoting her business was by throwing parties in her studio she used entertaining to diligently promote herself professionally and enjoyed a lively social life. (Berch 29)

Women would play a vital role in the development of the documentary approach to photography. In doing so, they would join their male counterparts in introducing the world to a new breed of photographers. These documentarians would travel anywhere, endure any hardship, risk almost any danger to record a way of life before it vanished or to focus attention on a particular situation, or to make people aware of conditions they felt needed to be corrected. These photographers taught the world that a truly great photograph is one which not only pleases or informs but simultaneously pulls deeply on the emotions of the viewer. (Sandler 71)

By the late 1800s Frances Benjamin Johnston decided that her photographic destiny lay beyond portraiture. She began to see the camera as a means of making important social statements. She began her documentary work by traveling first to the coalfields of Pennsylvania and then to the factories of Lynn, Massachusetts, to record working conditions in these places for Demorest's Family Magazine. The coalfield and factory pictures were so well received that Johnston was then commissioned to produce a series of photographs of the Washington D.C. public schools to be included in the United States exhibit at the Paris Exposition of 1900. Her photographs of Washington schoolchildren provide us with our earliest examples of her talent to detail. The pictures were of necessity, posed, and yet composed in such a way as to make them unforgettable rather than trite. (Sandler 71)

Some of her best work was yet to come. She was commissioned by the Hampton and Tuskegee African-American schools to photograph life at their institutions. Both schools had been founded to provide young black men and women with skills that would enable them to better their lives.

Some of the issues Frances faced as a woman working in a man's world having to deal with being in potentially dangerous situations.

Johnston had the eye to frame small images in the photograph itself. She also paid attention to detail and unique style of composition and satiny quality of most of her images. Her ability to capture the simple dignity of men, women, and children determined to rise from the shackles of the past that shone through in almost every photograph. (Sandler 72) The pictures Johnston captured for various publications revealed her concern for humanity, particularly the status of women. (Sandler 143)

Frances insatiably curious capturing images of the land presented yet another avenue of photographic exploration. She was particularly fascinated with the challenges presented by underground photography. In 1892 she traveled to Kentucky and descended into Mammoth Cave where she mounted a campaign "to vanish the arch-enemy darkness with flash powder." She found this more adventurously satisfying. (Sandler 115)

She adventured into Yellowstone National with the only access into the park was horseback or stagecoach, where the bears out numbered the tourists. The most spectacular landscape images that she captured were of a region still unspoiled by human intrusion; these images helped us understand why the original Native American tribes regarded this area as sacred ground. (Sandler 120)

Johnston supported herself through her work and therefore had a personal interest in the advancement of the professional status of women. Johnston was determined that photography be as female-friendly as possible. Her articles, her show of American women photographers in Paris, and her supportive correspondence with women in the field all as evidence of Johnston’s commitment to the advancement of women in professional photography.

The early twentieth-century art world was controlled by male artists where the female was their sexual object. The female’s role was supposed to be the model for the artist, not to be considered as an artist herself. Committed and undeterred, Johnston and others stayed in the field and kept working. It was Johnston and her cohort of professionals who paved the way for the next generation of women to assume their rightful position within the male dominated field of photography. As we witness how photography developed and how the roles of women changed with the variation of technology and its relation to society. (Barber 24) Johnston resisted and or ignored such stifling continued to set her own standards and followed her own intuition. While turn-of-the-century women in general led lives circumscribed by serious limitations on their choices, if not for women like Frances Benjamin Johnston in the early years, training other women, showing their work, offering patronage-the history might look very different. (Berch 147)

See below for some samples of Frances Benjamin Johnston’s vast array of her photography style.

REFERENCES

Barber, Elizabeth Wayland, Women’s Work The First 20,000 Years. Norton & Company, 1995.

Berch, Bettina, The Woman Behind the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benjamin Johnston 1864 - 1952. Virginia: The University Press of Virginia, 2000.

Daniel, Peter and Raymond Smock. A Talent For Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston. New York: Harmony Books, 1974.

Sandler, Martain W., Against the Odds Women Pioneers in the first Hundred Years of Photography. New York: Rizzoli International, 2002.

Johnston, Frances Benjamin. “What a Woman Can Do with a Camera.” Ladies Home Journal 1897