Notes
1 See Lincoln Kirstein, ed., The Hampton Album (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1966); Laura Wexler, “Black and White in Color: American Photographs at the Turn of the Century,” Prospects 13 (1988): 341-90; Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions in an Age of U. S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); James Guimond, Frances Johnston’s Hampton Album: A White Dream for Black People, American Photography and the American Dream.
2 Verna Posever Curtis, “Frances Benjamin Johnston in 1900: Staking the Sisterhood’s Claim in American Photography,” in Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris, 1900-1901, ed. Browyn A.E. Griffith (Giverny, France: Musée d’Art Américain Giverny, 2001). W. E. B. Du Bois said Johnston’s works were “an especially excellent series of photographs illustrating the Hampton idea of ‘teaching by doing’” (Curtis, 33).
3 Verna Posever Curtis, Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris 1900-1901, 26.
Articles by Frances B. Johnston before 1900
Demorest’s Family Magazine:
“Uncle Sam's Money,” Dec. 1889–Jan. 1890
“Story on the White House” May–June 1890
“Some Homes Under the Administration,” July–Dec. 1890
“Through the Coal Country with a Camera,” March 1892
“The Evolution of a Great Exposition,” describing the setup of the Chicago Exposition, April 1892
“Mammoth Cave by Flashlight,” June 1892
“From the Depths of a Crystallized Sea,” Feb. 1893
“The Foreign Legations at Washington,” Apr.–July 1893
“A Day at Niagara,” Aug. 1893
“Small White House Orchids,” June 1895
Additional Publications:
“The New Tenants of the White House,” Ladies' Home Journal, Oct. 1897
“Students in the Art of War,” Illustrated American, 23 June 1894
“Uncle Sam as Stamp-Maker,” Harper's Round Table, 11 June 1895
“Diplomatic Marriage,” Harper's Weekly, 7 April 1894
“Eagle’s Perch Abroad,” Harper’s Weekly, 18 May 1907
“Dobe Trophy House,” Country Life, August 1919
4 Pete Daniel and Raymond Smock, A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston 1889-1910, (New York, Harmony Books, 1974), 34.
5 The Library of Congress Prints and Photography collection.
6 As cited in Wexler, Tender Violence, p. 132.
7 See an excellent historiography of American women photographers in Naomi Rosenblum, A History of Women Photographers (New York, Abeville Press, 1994).
8 Curtis, Ambassadors of Progress: American Women Photographers in Paris 1900-1901, 26.
9 Wexler, “Black and White in Color;” Wexler, Tender Violence; Guimond, Frances Johnston’s Hampton Album. See also Jeanne M. Przyblyski, “American Visions at the Paris Exposition 1900: Another Look at Frances Benjamin Johnston’s Hampton Photographs,” Art Journal 57:3 (Fall 1998).
10 For their illustrations, newspapers and magazines in the 1880s relied heavily on zinc engravings, which were relatively easy for an artist to create from a photograph. The half tone process was used in 1850 but did not appear until 1880 in the New York Daily Graphic. In the 1890s the use of zinc engravings declined as a visual medium and they were often mixed with photography in the same illustrated article. In January 1904 the London Daily Mirror became the first daily newspaper in the world to use photography exclusively for its illustrations (Daniel and Smock, 41).
