Frances Benjamin Johnston

"Signing of the Protocol", marking the cessation of hostilities between the US and Spain in the Spanish–American War

Johnston was named an honorary member of the American Institute of Architects for her work in preserving old and endangered buildings. Her collections have been purchased by institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and the Baltimore Museum of Art. Although her relentless traveling was curtailed by petrol rationing in the Second World War, the tireless Johnston continued to photograph. She bought a house in the French Quarter of New Orleans in 1940, and retired there in 1945. She died in New Orleans in 1952 at the age of eighty-eight.

As a result of this exhibit, the University of Virginia hired her to document its buildings, and the state of North Carolina commissioned her to record its architectural history. Louisiana hired Johnston to document its huge inventory of rapidly deteriorating plantations. She was given a grant in 1933 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York to document Virginia's early architecture. This led to a series of grants and photographs in eight other southern states; copies of all of her photographs from these projects were given to the Library of Congress for public use. In December 1935, Johnston began a year long project to capture historic structures of the Colonial Era in Virginia. This was intended to be a one-year project, but it developed into an eight-year extensive project. She traveled 50,000 miles and surveyed 95 counties in Virginia.

Johnston lectured at New York University on business for women. The pair of women produced a series of studies of New York architecture through the 1920s. In early 1920 her mother died in New York.

George Washington Carver (front row, center) poses with fellow faculty of Tuskegee Institute, c. 1902

She photographed events such as world's fairs and peace-treaty signings. Johnston took the last portrait of President William McKinley, at the Pan-American Exposition of 1901 just before he was assassinated there. With her partner, Mattie Edwards Hewitt, a successful freelance home and garden photographer in her own right, Johnston opened a studio in New York in 1913. Her mother and aunt moved into her new apartment.

In 1899, Johnston was commissioned by Hollis Burke Frissell to photograph the buildings and students of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia in order to show its success. This commission added to her reputation. This series, documenting the ordinary life of the school, is considered among her most telling work. It was displayed at The Exhibit of American Negroes of the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900. Her photographs of the Hampton Institute were utilized in Robert Wilson's production of August Strindberg's A Dream Play.

Johnston also photographed Natalie Barney in Paris, who was a famous American heiress and literary salon socialite. Perhaps her most famous work, shown here, is her self-portrait as the liberated "New Woman", with petticoats showing and a beer stein in hand. Johnston advocated for the role of women in the burgeoning art of photography. The Ladies' Home Journal published Johnston's article in 1897 of "What a Woman Can Do With a Camera". With Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Johnston co-curated an exhibition of photographs by twenty-eight women photographers at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It afterward traveled to Saint Petersburg and Moscow in the Russian Empire, and to Washington, DC. She traveled widely in her thirties, taking a wide range of documentary and artistic photographs of coal miners, iron workers, women working in New England's textile mills, and sailors being tattooed on board ship, as well as her society commissions. While in England she photographed the stage actress Mary Anderson, who was a friend of her mother.

She took portraits of friends, family, and local figures before working as a freelance photographer and touring Europe in the 1890s. There she used her connection to Smillie to visit prominent photographers and gather items for the museum's collections. She gained further practical experience in her craft by working for the newly formed Eastman Kodak company in Washington, D.C., forwarding film for development and advising customers when cameras needed repairs. In 1894 she opened her own photographic studio in Washington, D.C., on V Street between 13th and 14th streets, and at the time was the only woman photographer in the city. She took portraits of many famous contemporaries, including suffragette Susan B. Anthony, writer Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Institute. Well connected among elite society, she was commissioned by magazines to do "celebrity" portraits, such as Alice Roosevelt's wedding portrait. She was dubbed the "Photographer to the American court." She photographed Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the children of President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt playing with their pet pony at the White House, and the gardens of Edith Wharton's famous villa near Paris.

The younger Frances Benjamin Johnston was raised in Washington, D.C., and educated privately. She graduated in 1883 from Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies (it developed later into a college and as Notre Dame of Maryland University). Afterward she studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris and the Washington Art Students League.

Frances Benjamin Johnston (January 15, 1864 – May 16, 1952) was an early American photographer and photojournalist whose career lasted for almost half a century. She is most known for her portraits, images of southern architecture, and various photographic series featuring African Americans and Native Americans at the turn of the 20th century.

The only surviving child of wealthy and well-connected parents who became established in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston was born in Grafton, West Virginia. Her mother Frances Antoinette Benjamin was from Rochester, New York, and could trace her ancestry to Revolutionary War patriot Isaac Clark. She married Anderson Doniphan Johnston, of Maysville, Kentucky, whose father, Dr. William Bryant Johnston, had been born in Virginia and practiced for decades across from Cincinnati, Ohio. Although his father owned an 11 year old Black boy in the 1850 census, Anderson Johnston sympathized with the Union, and Grafton was a key depot on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad as well as Union pay and supply depot during the American Civil War.