Frances "Fannie" Benjamin Johnston 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 established in Washington, DC, Frances Benjamin Johnston was born in Grafton, West Virginia. Her mother Frances Antoinette Benjamin was from Rochester, New York. She had married Anderson Doniphan Johnston, of Maysville, Kentucky. The couple had moved to the capital shortly after the Civil War. Frances Antoinette Benjamin Johnston had started in journalism as a special correspondent on Congress and was recognized as one of the first women to write on national affairs. She also served as a drama critic under the byline "Ione" for the Baltimore Sun.
The younger Frances 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. An independent and strong-willed young woman, Johnston wrote articles for periodicals before finding her creative outlet through photography. She was given her first camera by entrepreneur George Eastman, a close friend of the family, and inventor of the new, lighter, Eastman Kodak cameras and film process. She received training in photography and dark-room techniques from Thomas Smillie, director of photography at the Smithsonian.
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.
Having grown up in a family that traveled in elite circles of the capital, Johnston built on her connections and familiarity with the Washington political scene: she was appointed as official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, "TR" Roosevelt, and Taft presidential administrations.
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.
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.
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.

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