A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston 1889 -- 1910

Harmony Books, 1974. Trade Paperback. Very Good. Covers show light wear only. Book is otherwise in excellent condition. Binding is solid and square, , text/interior is clean and free of marking of any kind. Black and white illustrations, often full page. 182 pages. ""Frances Benjamin Johnston was a prominent studio photographer and photojournalist at the turn of the twentieth century. She presented three bodies of work at the Paris Exposition Universelle in 1900: a collection of photographs by American women, a series of photographs of students in the Washington, D.C., school system, and a series of photographs of students from the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute. These exhibits all promoted the nationalistic agenda of progress at the Paris Exposition, illustrating American advancement in art, education, and society."" ; ""Johnston was a significant-and arresting-figure in early twentieth-century photography.Johnston produced a good deal of the usual society portraiture of the time-including a nude photograph of a debutante that prompted the girl's outraged father to file a lawsuit-but she was also an important photodocumentarian. Students of African American history can reexamine life at Hampton Institute (now Hampton University) or Tuskegee using hundreds of photographs made by Johnston at the turn of the last century.through Johnston's work we can see Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the Roosevelt children playing with their pet pony at the White House, and the gardens of Edith Wharton's famous villa near Paris. Johnston's major project on early vernacular architecture of the American South preserves scores of buildings that no longer exist except on her film."" ; photos of the famous include Thordore ROosevelt, Susan B Anthony, Mark Twain, William McKinley, Joel Chandler Harris, Admiral Dewey, Booker T. Washington, Jacob Riis, Alexander Graham Bell, Jane E Clark, Andrew Carnegie, George Washington Carver, John Phillip Sousa, Helen Hay, John Milton Hay, General LEonard Ward, Julia Marlowe, Richard Hovey, Margaret James, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Albert Beveridge, Edith Wharton, DIfford Pinchot, Jane Cowl, and Ryan Tillman