Frances Benjamin Johnston: Capricorn Sun/Aries Moon
Stairway of the Treasurer's Residence: Students at Work from the Hampton Album, 1899-1900, Platinum print
Also titled: Students at work on a house built largely by them
Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) was a Capricorn Sun/Aries Moon, like today’s astrology. That Sun/Moon combo is pretty headstrong, confident, and a go-getter. Johnston was a photojournalist raised in Washington D.C, was given her first camera by Kodak inventor George Eastman, and received training in photography and darkroom work by the director of photography at the Smithsonian.
She opened her own photo studio in Washington D.C. in 1894, and at the time was the only woman photographer in the city. Being around influential people at a young age and taking her craft seriously is part her Capricorn Sun and part being born a white person into a rich, connected family. She started out taking portraits of celebrities and politicians and was the official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, Teddy Roosevelt and Taft presidential administrations.
Her “New Woman” self-portrait (below), shows how she advocated for women in and out of photography. She co-curated a photo show by women photographers at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, with fellow photographer Zaida Ben-Yusuf. She traveled a lot for her photography (her Venus, Mars, and asteroids Daguerre and Talbot in Sagittarius). She was a lesbian in a long relationship with fellow photographer Mattie Edwards Hewitt, whom she collaborated on photographs with, and who she started the Johnston-Hewitt Studio in New York specializing in architectural and garden photography, which functioned for four years until they broke up in 1917.
In 1899 she was commissioned to photograph the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute, a private historically black preparatory and trade school dedicated to preparing African American and Native American students for professional careers. She took over 150 photos at the school, and showed the work at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris, at a pavilion intended to show how race relations were improving in the U.S. Carrie Mae Weems has used Johnston’s Hampton Institute photos in her own work in what Weems described as “the problematic nature of assimilation, identity, and the role of education.”
Johnston recieved grants from many southern states to document their aging buildings, for which she traveled 50,000 miles (all that Sagittarius again), and spent eight years on. (Capricorn revels in long-term projects and goals). She retired in New Orleans, where she bought a house in the French Quarter.
Her Aries Moon shows up in her New Woman self-portrait, her self-portraits of herself as a man, being the first woman photographer in the nation’s capitol, being one of the first woman press photographers, and not being intimidated in a male-dominated field.
Her Capricorn Sun comes out in documenting buildings and gardens that were decaying and were going to be redeveloped and lost. Capricorn values history and structures, and in some ways archiving the past.
Johnston’s Talbot + Daguerre asteroids are conjunct her Venus in Sagittarius, explaining her curious nature, extensive travel for her photography, and interest in cultures very different from her own. Her Nipece asteroid is conjunct her North Node + Jupiter in Scorpio. Scorpio makes a great photojournalist because it wants to get to know why things happen, look under the surface, take time with a subject to get in their energy field.
Self Portrait (as New Woman), 1896
