Frances Benjamin Johnston (January 15, 1864 – May 16, 1952) was an early American photographer and photojournalist whose career lasted for almost half a century. She is most known for her portraits, images of southern architecture, and various photographic series featuring African Americans and Native Americans at the turn of the twentieth century. Early and family life The only surviving child of wealthy and well-connected parents who became established in Washington, D.C., Frances Benjamin Johnston was born in Grafton, West Virginia. Her mother Frances Antoinette Benjamin was from Rochester, New York, and could trace her ancestry to Revolutionary War patriot Isaac Clark. She married Anderson Doniphan Johnston, of Maysville, Kentucky, whose father, Dr. William Bryant Johnston, had been born in Virginia and practiced for decades across from Cincinnati, Ohio. Anderson Doniphan Johnston's sister, Elizabeth Bryant Johnston, was a historian. Although his father owned an 11-year-old Black boy in the 1850 census, Anderson Johnston sympathized with the Union, and Grafton was a key depot on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad as well as Union pay and supply depot during the American Civil War. Her mother Frances Antoinette Benjamin Johnston survived her husband by nearly two decades. She started in journalism as a special correspondent on Congress and was recognized as one of the first women to write on national affairs. She also worked as a drama critic under the byline "Ione" for the Baltimore Sun. Her parents moved to the national capital shortly after the Civil War, when she was an infant, possibly in part because they lost three infants during the war years. Her father began his more than three-decade long federal government career as an assistant bookkeeper in the Treasury Department. The younger Frances Benjamin Johnston was raised in Washington, D.C., and educated privately. She graduated in 1883 from Notre Dame of Maryland Collegiate Institute for Young Ladies (it developed later into a college and as Notre Dame of Maryland University). Afterward she studied art at the Académie Julian in Paris and the Washington Art Students League. Career Johnston began writing articles for periodicals before finding her creative outlet through photography. She was given her first camera by entrepreneur George Eastman, a close friend of the family, and inventor of the new, lighter, Eastman Kodak cameras and film process. She received training in photography and dark-room techniques from Thomas Smillie, director of photography at the Smithsonian. She took portraits