Scope and Content Note
The papers of Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) span the period 1855-1956, with the bulk of the collection concentrated in the years 1890-1945. The collection is organized in nine series: Diaries , Family Correspondence , General Correspondence , Special Correspondence , Speeches and Writings , Financial Papers , Miscellany , Addition , and Oversize . The General Correspondence forms the most significant part of the papers and is particularly complete for the period between 1925 and 1952.
Johnston's career coincides with the Pictorialist movement, which promoted photography as an art form in America and in which she took part. Johnston herself was a pioneer in several photography fields. She began as an artistic amateur and continued as a portrait photographer, photojournalist, and architectural photographer. Her diverse career may be divided into three time periods: 1889-1910, when she was engaged in photographing national figures and important events in American life; 1913-1926, when she concentrated on garden and estate photography; and 1927-1952, when she compiled a systematic and interpretive photographic record of early Southern colonial architecture.
During the early years of her career, Johnston divided her time between Washington, D.C., where as America's “court photographer” she photographed many prominent members of the capital's political, literary, diplomatic, and social community, and various localities throughout the United States and Europe, where she gathered research data, formed important contacts, and performed work on a contractual basis for newspapers, magazines, groups, and individuals. Representative clients who posed for Johnston, often in the informal surroundings of her decorative northwest Washington studio, included Thomas B. Reed, Joseph Cannon, William McKinley, Mark Hanna, Susan B. Anthony, Alice Hay, Helen Hay, Booker T. Washington, Joel Chandler Harris, Frances Folsom Cleveland, Elizabeth Cameron, Joseph Pennell, and the family of Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) , whose published photographs, especially, received wide attention.
From 1898 to 1906 Johnston maintained a close business association with George Grantham Bain, America's first important newspaper picture agent, and the voluminous, often spirited, correspondence of Bain concerning major news events of the period documents the pressures inherent in the relatively new field of photojournalism. Johnston worked on commission for several leading magazines, particularly Ladies' Home Journal and McClure's, as evidenced by the correspondence of publisher Edward Bok and editor Ida M. Tarbell, respectively. Johnston's participation in the major international exhibitions of the period, held in Chicago in 1893, Paris in 1900, Buffalo in 1901, and St. Louis in 1904, all important in enlarging her reputation, are the subject of much correspondence.
The role of women in photography was of special interest to Frances Johnston. An 1897 Ladies' Home Journal article, not found in the collection, on what a woman can do with a camera, stimulated much reader interest. In 1900, Johnston was appointed delegate to the International Congress of Photography at the Paris Exposition and was asked to prepare a paper on the work of American woman photographers. The replies which she received, in response to her query of leading women photographers, form the body of the Special Correspondence series. Three of the more prominent correspondents in that group, Gertrude Käsebier, Catharine Weed Barnes Ward, and Eva Watson Schütze, are also represented in the General Correspondence , as are many other important figures in photography, American and European, at that time. Those names include J. Craig Annan, R. Child Bayley, Charles I. Berg, F. Holland Day, Robert Demachy, Adolf De Meyer, George Eastman, A. Horsley Hinton, Antoine Lumiére, Thomas W. Smillie, Alfred Stieglitz, H. Snowden Ward, and Walter E. Woodbury.
Johnston traveled to Europe frequently in this period, often in the company of her mother, Frances Antoinette Benjamin Johnston, and her Aunt “Nin,” Cornelia Benjamin Hagan. Although her Diaries are largely incomplete, those kept by her mother during their trips abroad in 1900 and 1906 are detailed and informative. Johnston's close relationship with both her mother, a former newspaper correspondent who frequently acted as her daughter's secretary, and her aunt is documented in the Family Correspondence . Other significant correspondents of the period include Henry Adams, Elizabeth S. Cameron, Bliss Carman, Frances Folsom Cleveland, George B. Cortelyou, Theodore Dreiser, Hollis Burke Frissell, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Joseph C. Hornblower, B. F. Johnson, Charles Follen McKim, James Rush Marshall, Charles Moore, Edward Penfield, Ethel Reed, and Mills Thompson.
In 1913, Johnston formed a partnership in New York with Mattie Edwards Hewitt, specializing in exterior and interior architectural photography. After the termination of the partnership in 1917, Johnston devoted the following ten years primarily to garden and estate photography, although she remained active in architectural photography, receiving commissions and having her photographs published in magazines, copies of some of which may be found in the Miscellany . Traveling extensively throughout the United States , Johnston photographed a variety of well-known gardens and estates. She also gave numerous lectures, accompanied by color lantern slides, and mounted garden prints to be exhibited at various horticultural shows and lecture sites. A sampling of the captions that Johnston provided Town and Country, the magazine to which she contributed most frequently, may be found in the Speeches and Writings file . Newspaper clippings in the Miscellany series provide insight into the extent of her activities during this period, otherwise sparsely represented in the collection. Prominent correspondents include Nellie Allen, William Lawrence Bottomley, Walter Gay, Frederick Law Olmsted, Augusta Owen Patterson, H. J. Whigham, and Waddy B. Wood.
In 1927, Johnston received a private commission to photograph architecturally historic buildings in Fredericksburg and Old Falmouth, Virginia. In 1930, she donated to the Library of Congress the prints from this survey, which formed the nucleus of the Pictorial Archive of Early American Architecture, and initiated an important association that was to last for the remainder of her life. A longtime advocate of historic preservation, Johnston, with the encouragement of Leicester Bodine Holland, chief of the Library's Fine Arts Division, sought and received financial aid from the Carnegie Corporation in 1933 to record on film historically significant Southern colonial architecture disappearing from the American landscape. She devoted the greater part of the following seven years to this survey, traveling over one hundred thousand miles throughout the South; the extensive correspondence, survey lists, notes, maps, and related material in the Miscellany document her activities.
In her later years Johnston continued to work on commission for individuals and magazines and collaborated with several authors and publishing houses on architectural monographs and books, most notably during 1939-1941 when she worked closely with Thomas Tileston Waterman and the University of North Carolina Press on the publication The Early Architecture of North Carolina. Working until nearly the end of her life, Johnston spent her last years in planning exhibits of her photographic work, which were mounted in various state and university museums, and in organizing a portion of her large collection of prints and negatives, housed in the Prints and Photographs Division at the Library Congress. For information on the Library's holdings of the Frances Benjmain Johnston collection, readers may consult The Guide to Special Collections of Prints and Photographs in the Library of Congress, compiled by Paul Vanderbilt in 1955. Notable correspondents appearing in the last segment of Johnston's career include Zelda Branch, H. I. Brock, Edmund S. Campbell, Jo Hubbard Chamberlain, Paul Philippe Cret, Leicester Bodine Holland, Frederick P. Keppel, Hans Kindler, Clara E. Laughlin, Waldo Gifford Leland, G. B. Lorraine, John C. Merriam, Margaret Mitchell, and Thomas Tileston Waterman.
The Financial Papers include correspondence relating to Johnston's numerous real estate properties in Washington and New Orleans, where she moved in 1945. The Miscellany, in addition to material mentioned above, includes information on Johnston's genealogy and scrapbooks relating to her mother's career as a newspaper correspondent; it also contains a file of service certificates of Pennsylvania veterans of the Civil War.
A small addition contains correspondence and lists of photographs addressed to Hiram Faver regarding Johnston's photographs of St. Augustine, Florida. Also included is a letter from the Society of American Fakirs, as well as press releases and news clippings.