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JOHNSTON, FRANCES BENJAMIN
(1864–1952)
In her Obituary in Time magazine in 1952, Frances
Benjamin Johnston was remembered as a ‘onetime
news photographer who had an inside track to the
White House because of her friendships with Presidents
Harrison, McKinley, and Theodore Roosevelt... With
a box-like camera given to her by George Eastman in
1887, she snapped such shots as McKinley on the eve
of his assassination.’ McKinley died in 1901 actually
only 17 minutes after she had taken the photograph, and
by that time Johnston, already widely recognised as an
accomplished photographer, would have been using
much more sophisticated equipment.
Born in Grafton, West Virginia, on 15th January 1864,
she studied art in Paris in 1883 to 1884 before returning
to America to continue her studies in Washington.
Her photographic output throughout the late 19th and
early 20th centuries was wide ranging and embraced
portraiture and documentary, architectural, and even
subterranean photography in the caves of Kentucky.
An accomplished writer as well as a photographer,
she produced many infl uential articles about architec-
ture, photography, and photographers, over a career
lasting more than fi fty years. Amongst those, a series
on the foremost women photographers of the period
in America, published in the Ladies Home Journal in
1901–1902, included essays on Gertrude Käsebier, Eva
Watson-Schultz, and others.
John Hannavy
JOHNSTON, JOHN DUDLEY (1868–1955)
John Dudley Johnston is remembered both for his in-
fl uence on the sesssionist movement in Britain and as
architect of the Royal Photographic Society collection.
Revered during the fi rst years of the 20th century for
subtle depths of his gum platinum prints—such as the
minimalist Valley of the Dragon (1909), Johnston was
an infl uential member of the Linked Ring and associated
with foremost photographers of the period in both the
USA and Europe.
Johnston was born on 23 April 1868 at 42 Arnold
Street, Toxteth Park, Liverpool. He was the son of John
Glynn Johnston, a general merchant and his wife Laura
Dudley, by whose former surname he was known. Dud-
ley Johnston was the eldest of six children. The family
stayed briefl y in central Liverpool before moving on
to Seaforth and in 1877 to “Inglewood,” Sandon Park,
Wavertree—on the outskirts of Liverpool. Johnston left
school in 1883 to become a company clerk in Liverpool
and by 1901 he was established as a merchant in India
Rubber with Messrs Heilbut, Symons & Co at 9 Rum-
ford Street. He married Edith Maud Barker in 1897 and
set up home at 76 Huskisson Street in central Liver-
pool, where he lived for 14 years. Before his marriage,
Johnston, an able clarinet player, was very active in the
Liverpool Orchestral Society and later played with the
Halle orchestra. He was the Liverpool correspondent for
London Musical Courier through which he developed
many contacts in other parts of the country. He resigned
as correspondent in 1897—much to the regret of the
Editor. Johnston was becoming deeply interested in
photography inspired particularly by a trip to Norway
in 1893, which he recorded with a camera.
Already a giant of the northern photography move-
ment before he moved to London, Johnston exhibited
at the Northern Photographic Exhibition at the Walker
Art Gallery in 1904. The fi rst Northern Exhibition
had been held in 1901 and subsequently exhibitions
were held every three years in Liverpool, Manchester
or Leeds. With its rotating venues, trade display and
evening lantern lectures, the Northern was considered
the most comprehensive of the pre-First World War
exhibitions. It was to become a national beacon for
pictorial photographers with exhibitors such as Horsley
Hinton, Charles Job, Chas Inston, Alex Keighley, F.J.
Mortimer and Frederick Evans and, latterly, Hoppe and
Dührkoop.
Johnston became increasingly active in the Northern
exhibitions and with the instigating institution, the Liv-
erpool Amateur Photographic Association—one of the
oldest photographic organisations in Britain. Johnston’s
own work was revered not only for its impressionistic
technique and exploitation of innovative photographic
process, but also for his vision in capturing the solid
monumentality, civic pride and industry of the north.
For example, in Liverpool an Impression (1911), a horse
drawn carriage disappears into the fog at the side of the
Royal Insurance Company’s building—contemporarily
considered the most important example of commercial
architecture in Liverpool, while Manchester—an Im-
pression (1906) reveals a sublime beauty in a canalised
river closed in by waterside mills and scaffolding. At
the tiem of the 1907 exhibition, Johnston was a mem-
ber of the Exhibition Committee and Vice President of
Liverpool Amateur Photographic Association, by 1911,
he had risen to become President and also Chair of the
Northern Exhibition Committee. He was elected to the
Linked Ring in 1907 in which he rapidly became active
and infl uential. As with music, he networked beyond
the three cities of the Northern Exhibition and not just
to London: George Good, photographer and author of
A History of the Liverpool Amateur Photographic As-
sociation (1953) recalled how Johnston took a party
of Liverpool photographers south to meet a group of
Birmingham photographers and observed ‘a memorable
collection of photographic talent indeed’.
In 1911 Johnston made a career move to London.
On his arrival, he immediately involved himself with