of friends, family, and local figures before working as a freelance photographer and touring Europe in the 1890s. There she used her connection to Smillie to visit prominent photographers and gather items for the museum's collections. She gained further practical experience in her craft by working for the newly formed Eastman Kodak company in Washington, D.C., forwarding film for development and advising customers when cameras needed repairs. In 1894 she opened her own photographic studio in Washington, D.C., on V Street between 13th and 14th streets, and at the time was the only woman photographer in the city. She took portraits of many famous contemporaries, including suffragette Susan B. Anthony, writer Mark Twain and Booker T. Washington, principal of the Tuskegee Institute. Well connected among elite society, she was commissioned by magazines to do "celebrity" portraits, such as Alice Roosevelt's wedding portrait. She was dubbed the "Photographer to the American court." She photographed Admiral Dewey on the deck of the USS Olympia, the children of President Theodore "Teddy" Roosevelt playing with their pet pony at the White House, and the gardens of Edith Wharton's famous villa near Paris. While in Paris, Johnston also photographed Natalie Barney, a famous American heiress and literary salon socialite. Having grown up in a family that traveled in elite circles of the capital, Johnston built on her connections and familiarity with the Washington political scene: she was appointed as official White House photographer for the Harrison, Cleveland, McKinley, "TR" Roosevelt, and Taft presidential administrations. Perhaps her most famous work, shown here, is her self-portrait as the liberated "New Woman", with petticoats showing and a beer stein in hand. Johnston advocated for the role of women in the burgeoning art of photography. In 1897 the Ladies' Home Journal published Johnston's article "What a Woman Can Do With a Camera", describing how to achieve artistic and financial success in photography as a profession. With Zaida Ben-Yusuf, Johnston co-curated an exhibition of photographs by twenty-eight women photographers at the 1900 Exposition Universelle in Paris. It afterward traveled to Saint Petersburg and Moscow in the Russian Empire, and to Washington, DC. She traveled widely in her thirties, taking a wide range of documentary and artistic photographs of coal miners, iron workers, women working in New England's textile mills, and sailors being tattooed on board ship, as well as her society commissions. While in England she photographed the stage actress