Johnston first photographed New Orleans in 1938, and as any photographer would, she fell in love with the city. She also took a memorable photograph of famed lesbian Natalie Clifford Barney, who ran an influential literary salon in Paris for nearly 60 years.
The images in your head when you think of Mark Twain or Susan B. She also documented the lives of factory workers and African-American students in the South, most notably the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Johnston then turned her lens to gardens and estates before embarking on a remarkable project to pictorially document Southern architecture. presidents, and Theodore Roosevelt named her the first official White House photographer.
In addition to concentrating on female nudes, something quite extraordinary for the time, she also began photographing celebrities, politicians, and members of Washington society. Johnston quickly became one of the country’s first female photojournalists before opening her own studio to focus on portraiture. Upon returning to the States, she took up photography and blazed a trail in that (then) young field for other lesbian photographers, such as Clara Sipprell, Alice Austin, and later, Annie Leibovitz.
Frances Benjamin Johnston Houseīorn in the Victorian era during the Civil War, Johnston grew up in Washington, D.C., before studying art in Paris.
