Frances Benjamin Johnson: Redefining “First Lady”

When you hear the words First Lady and White House, images of elegance and history arise. Jackie, Birdie, Eleanor, Michelle… women whose lives were shaped by marriage and the roles they assumed beside their husbands. Frances Benjamin Johnson was a different kind of “first lady”, however, who arrived at the White House on her own terms and made history as the first woman to photograph a sitting president. She was recognized not only as the first female photojournalist and press photographer, but also as one of the first Americans to earn a living as a professional photographer, which was a feat in her day. She documented news events and architectural landmarks while producing portraits of political and social leaders over a career that spanned more than five decades.

In the exhibition The Woman Behind the Lens: Frances Benjamin Johnson and the American Presidency currently on view at the Keller Gallery in the McKinley Presidential Library and Museum in Canton, Ohio, her photographs show the arc of her career, from presidential portraits to historic gardens, self-portraits, African and Native American students, and Southern architecture. According to the White House Historical Association, “From the 1880s to the 1910s, Johnson captured remarkable images of the White House that document the lifestyles of the first families, workers, and visitors as well as its architectural design in that period.”

After establishing her own photography studio in 1894 in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864–1952) was described by The Washington Post as “the only lady in the business of photography in the city.” She did have a one-up, however, in having Kodak founder George Eastman as an intimate family friend. It was Eastman, in fact, who gave Johnson her first camera. Afterward, through her connections with an already budding career illustrating and writing magazine articles, and from the notoriety gained from photographing President Benjamin Harris’s father-in-law Dr. Scott with her new camera, she went on to become the primary photographer for Presidents Benjamin Harrison, Grover Cleveland, William McKinley, Theodore Rosevelt, and William Howard Taft.

The exhibition features the requisite formal portraits of Booker T. Washington, Samuel Clemens (better known as Mark Twain), and other notable figures, as well as a significant photograph of President William McKinley delivering his final speech at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, NY, the day before his assassination. It was this photograph that served as the model for the statue, created by sculptor Charles Henry Niehas, on the steps of the McKinley National Memorial.  

These were not the most compelling works on view, however. While the presidential portraits likely paid the bills, Johnson dabbled in self-portraiture in the late nineteenth century, producing images of herself dressed as a man with a false mustache, as well as smoking and holding a beer stein. Although little is known about the personal life of the artist, these photographs offer insight into who she was outside of her profession; a fun, fearless, independent female who was undoubtedly ahead of her time. She often photographed first daughter Alice Roosevelt as well, who was notoriously feisty and won the hearts of the American public who dubbed her “Princess Alice”. I like to think these women had a lot in common and enjoyed their time together being rambunctious. Of his daughter’s antics, President Roosevelt famously said, “I can do one of two things. I can be President of the United States or I can control Alice Roosevelt. I cannot possibly do both.” Several photographs of Alice are included in the exhibition, along with the Roosevelt family and their menagerie of pets.

Included in the exhibition as well are twelve photographs on loan from the Museum of Modern Art, New York from her most celebrated and controversial series, The Hampton Album. In 1889, Johnson was commissioned to photograph Black and Native American students at The Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, VA for presentation at the Exposition Universelle in Paris. The Hampton Institute was a preparatory and trade school dedicated to preparing African American and Native American students for professional careers. The resulting series earned the grand prize at the Paris exhibition. They include photographs of African American students learning trades such as brick laying and estimating the combined draught of horses.

Johnston’s photographs of the Hampton Institute were only a part of her long and productive career. In the 1910s, she turned her focus to extensively photographing gardens and historic buildings, using her work to advocate for the preservation of architectural structures that were rapidly vanishing. She was one of the first contributors to the Library of Congress’s Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture and created a systematic record of early American buildings and gardens called the Carnegie Survey of the South. Although works from these series are not included in the exhibition, they remain essential to understanding the artist’s broader oeuvre and her significant contribution to the preservation of history in the early twentieth century.

The Keller Gallery exhibition only scratches the surface of her impressive career. Nevertheless, it is well worth the time to experience the historical works on view and reflect on the legacy of America’s first professional photographer. My favorite image in the show is undoubtedly Self Portrait, 1896 where she is posing as an independent “new woman”. When she died in 1952, The Saint Augustine Record’s description of her fits this image perfectly. “Miss Johnson was a vain untidy woman who chain-smoked and liked a drink now and then. Her language was picturesque. She had amazing vitality and paid her advancing years no mind. She would risk life and limb to get a good shot.”

The Woman Behind the Lens: Frances Benjamin Johnson and the American Presidency
February 12-May 21, 2026
Keller Gallery, McKinley Presidential Library and Museum
800 McKinley Monument Drive NW
Canton, OH 44708
mckinleymuseum.org