HISTORY ALIVE! FRANCES B. JOHNSTON
Recently, I auditioned successfully to portray a historical character for the Humanities Council in West Virginia. Her
name is Frances B. Johnston, a photographer of considerable renown at the turn of the last century. She was
born in Grafton, WV, in 1864, lived to 88, and died in 1952. I portray Frances in the year 1910. By that time, she
had accomplished an astounding number of artistic creations via her photographs and a considerable reputation
as a business woman and feminist advocate, living and working in Washington, DC.
After attending the Academy Julian in Paris, where she studied art, she returned to Washington to put her artistic
talents to work as an illustrator for Demorest Family Magazine. Soon she noticed the changing technology allowed
photographs to accompany articles. She wrote to family friend, George Eastman, to ask what camera she might
use. By way of an answer, he sent her a Kodak, a lightweight camera he’d recently invented. She never looked
back. She said, “The camera will allow me to go wherever I want to go.” And that meant into a man’s realm if that’s
what she wanted to do.
Business and art were equally driving forces in Frances’s life, but beyond these forces were contrasting traits in
her personality. On the one hand, there’s her diplomacy and decorum necessary to make money. She was
professional, kind, thoughtful, thorough, and resourceful, and through her business efforts supported herself all
her life. After working hard all day, in the evening she became a Bohemian of the first order. She and her friends
held parties that sometimes involved dressing up in silly costumes and photographing themselves. She smoked
and drank—bourbon, neat. She lived in a time when women’s lives were circumscribed by society to few
opportunities other than as wife and mother. She chose to be neither, but was a champion of a woman’s ability to
choose her course in life.
Like the photographer Margaret Bourke-White a generation later, Frances forged new ground by visiting places
considered not “proper” for a lady. She descended underground to photograph coal miners in Pennsylvania;
perched on a narrow scaffolding 20 feet above President McKinley at the Pan-American Exhibit in Buffalo to take
what turned out to be the last photo of the president before he was gunned down by an assassin. As the
“American Court Photographer” she photographed the most powerful men in the world—five sitting presidents:
Cleveland, Harrison, McKinley, Roosevelt, and Taft.
Frances, at times, could be a bit condescending, but she had a generosity of spirit that adds to her complexity and
brings her alive. She gave of her time, money, and artistic expertise to many fledgling photographers. Historically,
she didn’t create events recorded in our history books, but she photographed a good bit of history, often as it was
happening. The Library of Congress holds 25,000 of her photos.
Because of her strong sense of equality, we have the photographs of students at Hampton and Tuskegee;
workers—mostly women—in the Lynn Shoe factory at the end of the 1800s, a female supervisor of men at a box
factory. We have photos taken at the US mint showing African Americans and Whites working side by side in
equality in an era of Jim Crow laws. Because of her talent, the famous flocked to be photographed by her. Besides
the presidents, she photographed Mark Twain, Susan B. Anthony, Booker T. Washington, and many others. She
also photographed ordinary people in the countryside, capturing their grace and dignity. She believed anyone on
the other side of the lens had as much dignity as she. Her legacy continued in the latter 25 years of her life when
she photographed Southern architecture that led to the core of photographs used in the establishment of the
Department of Historic Preservation.
Frances lived her life as she saw fit. She spent little time pontificating on the current issues of the day and did not
participate in collective protest. She made her statement through her work and in how she conducted her life. I
could wish she was my alter ego, but I will never have the courage of Frances. I can only try to portray her with
grace and dignity in a modern-day setting, hoping I sink into her character enough so that the audience senses
her reality and her beauty and depth. She still has much to show us about how to be in this new century.