Frances Benjamin Johnston: Cultural & Artistic Influence

Frances Benjamin Johnston was one of the first American women to make photography a public profession, and she became a visible advocate for others who hoped to follow her. Her 1897 essay "What a Woman Can Do with a Camera" and the exhibition of American women photographers she organized for the 1900 Paris exposition helped establish photography as a field in which women could earn a living and exhibit serious work. As a working press and portrait photographer with access to the centers of power in Washington, she demonstrated by example that a woman could build an independent professional career behind the camera.

Her Hampton Institute photographs have had a long and complicated afterlife. Rediscovered by Lincoln Kirstein, who found an album of the prints in a Washington bookstore, they were exhibited and published by the Museum of Modern Art in 1966 and have since become central to scholarly debates about race, education, and the politics of representation. Today they are studied both as accomplished photographs and as documents of how an institution and its sponsors chose to present African American and Native American education at the turn of the century.

Through her garden photography and her many illustrated lectures, Johnston helped popularize American garden design during the early twentieth century, supplying images to magazines, designers, and garden clubs at a time of growing public interest in landscape and horticulture.

Because the great majority of her work is held by the Library of Congress with no known restrictions on publication, Johnston's images circulate widely in books, exhibitions, and online collections, keeping her record of American life, education, gardens, and architecture continuously available to the public.