over several weeks in december 1899 and January 1900, Frances

Benjamin Johnston photographed the student body of the Hampton Normal

and Agricultural Institute in Hampton, Virginia. Almost a thousand strong, it
was made up predominantly of African Americans—many the children or grand-
children of former slaves—as well as more than a hundred Native Americans.1
Inside the classrooms and in the cool wintry light outdoors, male and female
students held still before her eight-by-ten-inch view camera as a succession

Learning
of choreographed tableaux was recorded onto glass plate negatives. The result-
ing nearly 150 photographs show the students dressed practically, if formally,
according to Victorian codes of propriety. Whether in a geo­graphy lesson on

the Meaning European cathedral towns or a physics class estimating the combined draft of
horses, they appear completely absorbed in their studies, and with very few

of Things
exceptions seem determined (or were instructed) not to look into the camera.
Johnston had been commissioned by the school to make these images,
which reached an international audience soon thereafter as part of the American
Negro Exhibit in the Palace of Social Economy at the 1900 Paris Exposition. The
Sarah Hermanson Meister intention behind this display, which was funded by the U.S. government, was
to cast the country in a good light by showcasing the progress being made by
African Americans after the abolition of slavery.2 More specifically, Johnston’s
images were intended to illustrate Hampton’s educational philosophy, which was
based on the idea of vocational training, with a hands-on curriculum designed
to train future teachers and to provide graduates with a range of practical skills.
This approach, which became known as the Hampton model, played
into a growing controversy about African American education that would con-
tinue to resonate through the civil rights era of the 1960s and still echoes today.3
A few years after these images were made, it pitted two gifted African American
leaders against one another. A vocal champion of Hampton’s approach was Booker
T. Washington, born into slavery and himself the product of a Hampton educa-
tion, who subscribed to the belief that education for African Americans ought
to be anchored in the instruction of practical skills, and that vocational train-
ing was the best way to improve the economic condition of the vast majority of
African Americans, particularly in the South. But not long after Johnston’s pho-
tographs were taken, W. E. B. Du Bois forcefully argued that economic advance-
ment on these terms was far too limited a goal, acknowledging Washington’s
successes while arguing that “[his] programme practically accepts the alleged
inferiority of the Negro races” and criticizing his failure to push for three key
demands: the right to vote, civic equality, and “the education of youth according

7
to ability.”4 Du Bois’s more radical position was, of course, less well received by
those intent on maintaining racial hierarchies,5 although it would prevail over
the course of the twentieth century, paving the way for the civil rights movement
as well as spurring shifts at Hampton itself, which was accredited as a college in
1933 and in 1984 became Hampton University.6
The debate between Du Bois and Washington is mirrored in the
reception of Johnston’s album, which has been beset by the question of how
much her own photographs share in the problematic aspects of the Hampton
model. One writer, James Guimond, memorably described The Hampton Album
in 1991 as “a white dream for black people.” According to Guimond, Johnston’s
photographs “inherently created an idealized conception of racial relationships
that was very popular with white northerners and philanthropists: a separate-
but-equal educational system in which blacks would be allowed to progress
toward ‘civilization’ under the tutelage of conservative educators who would—
like Johnston with her camera—benevolently approve of very limited black
aspirations.”7 However compelling this argument sounds, others have, as is the
case with Washington himself, argued that the truth is more complicated,
especially in the context of the American South around 1900.8
Another question concerns how the aesthetic and formal qualities of
Johnston’s images relate to the message they were intended to convey. They
were both explicitly didactic and notable for their artistry; for Johnston these
characteristics were not incompatible. Her photographs are striking in how
they appear to offer a visual equivalent of lucid prose, seducing us with a trans-
parency that seems incontrovertible. The students who listen with such rapt
attention to lessons in ancient history and capillary phenomena, write their
own music, and demonstrate their aptitude constructing telephones or inspect-
ing milk are doing these things just three years after the United States Supreme
Court upheld the constitutionality of racial segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson,
and at a moment when lynching was tragically common.9 Perhaps the serenity
of Johnston’s images was itself part of their agenda; the feminist scholar Laura
Wexler has put it like this: “A generation after the Civil War, with its 600,000
battlefield dead, it was evidently much more attractive for both Europeans and
white Americans to believe that contemporary black life was like life at Hampton
than to attend to evidence of its catastrophic degradation.”10
At the turn of the twentieth century, however, Johnston’s photo­graphs
and the display they were part of in Paris were considered a great success. The
American Negro Exhibit was widely celebrated in the African American press at
8
home, and traveled to two venues in the United States in the years that followed.
But as the pedagogic model espoused by Hampton fell into disfavor, Johnston’s
images faded into obscurity, too, until they were rediscovered by a young art
enthusiast and collector named Lincoln Kirstein during World War II. He was
stationed near Washington, D.C., where he happened across a “plump, anony-
mous, leatherbound album, old and scuffed” in W. H. Lowdermilk & Co., a book-
store that specialized in American history and political science.11
For more than two decades, the album “rested on [Kirstein’s] private
shelves to be shown to a few photographers or historians, all of whom imme-
diately relished its precious savor,” although none knew whom to credit as its
maker.12 By 1965 it appears that Monroe Wheeler, who was at the time respon-
sible for The Museum of Modern Art’s publications department, persuaded
Kirstein to give it to the Museum.13 Kirstein, Wheeler, and John Szarkowski (then
director of MoMA’s Department of Photography) each appreciated the aesthetic
value of the prints, the intelligent compositional structure of the images, and
the rarity of finding such an album intact. On January 11, 1966, The Museum of
Modern Art’s exhibition of 43 of the original platinum prints (out of a total of
159) opened to the public and the album began to be recognized as an important
piece of photographic history. This exhibition traveled to eleven venues around
the United States and Canada, accompanied by a modestly scaled catalogue fea-
turing handsome gravure reproductions of this same selection and a thoughtful
if sanguine essay by Kirstein about the photographs, Hampton, and Johnston.14
Although the exhibition took place during the height of the civil rights move-
ment in the United States, the Museum barely alluded to that context publicly in
the materials accompanying the show.
Some fifty-odd years later, The Museum of Modern Art is now publish-
ing all the images for the first time. The occasion brings with it a new opportu-
nity to interrogate some of the historical biases and lacunae in our scholarship.
New research has uncovered fascinating details about the material history of
the album and the circumstances of its original display, while recent critical
thinking around the possibility of discerning a plurality of voices from photo­
graphs long understood as neutral historical records challenges us to tease
apart layers of intent and reception.15 Above all, these photographs speak across
time to the complicated zones where race and representation, document and
art, history and the present meet.
The woman who makes photography profitable must have, as to personal
qualities, good common sense, unlimited patience to carry her through endless
failures, equally unlimited tact, good taste, a quick eye, a talent for detail, and
a genius for hard work. In addition, she needs training, experience, some capi-
tal, and a field to exploit.16
—FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON (1897)

Born on January 15, 1864 in Grafton, West Virginia, Johnston was the only child
in her family to survive infancy, and she made the most of the considerable
opportunities her white, middle-class parents were able to provide.17 By 1875,
after some time in Rochester, New York, her family had settled in Washington,
D.C. Her father worked at the Treasury Department and, unusually for the era,
her mother covered congressional news as a journalist. Abandoning early plans
to become a writer, Johnston spent two years at the Académie Julian in Paris
training to be an artist. She returned to the U.S. capital city in 1885, joined the
Art Students League, and began publishing short articles that she would illus-
trate with her own drawings. According to legend, taking advantage of her fam-
ily’s connections in Rochester, she wrote to George Eastman in 1888—the year
after he had established the Eastman Kodak Company there—and he sent her
one of the first cameras his company produced. Kodak’s advertising campaign
at the time, “You Press the Button, We Do the Rest,” targeted the vast amateur
audience who sought to capture friends and family on film without needing to
concern themselves with technical details.
Johnston had bigger aims, however. Her ambition to earn a living as
a professional photographer soon led her to secure formal photography train-
ing with Thomas Smillie, director of the Smithsonian Institution’s Division of
Photography. Johnston began contributing to national magazines, most often
Demorest’s Family Magazine but also Illustrated American, Cosmopolitan, and
Harper’s Weekly. Prompted in part by these assignments, as well as freelance
Fig. 1. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON
work for George Grantham Bain’s news service (the first such picture agency in Untitled (self-portrait in her Washington, D.C., studio). 1896
the United States), Johnston made the bold decision, around her thirtieth birth- Gelatin silver print, 7 3⁄4 x 6 3⁄16 in. (19.7 x 15.7 cm)
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
day, to open her own portrait studio in a purpose-built two-story brick structure
at the rear of the garden behind her parents’ house in Washington, D.C.18
Her accomplishments did not go unnoticed. In 1895, The Washington through in the 1896 self-portrait made in this studio, which shows her as a defi-
Times noted: “Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston is the only lady in the business antly liberated woman, with her skirt hiked up, beer stein in one hand and
of photography in the city, and in her skillful hands it has become an art that cigarette in the other (fig. 1). Johnston’s entrepreneurial ambition was entwined
rivals the geniuses of the Old World.”19 Her confidence that this was so shines with her bohemian sensibility; her artistic training was essential to both.

9
 Along with her professional success came artistic recognition, most
notably through the favor of the photographer and impresario Alfred Stieglitz,
and her presence in Camera Notes, the journal he edited.20 This helped make
her a clear choice for the Hampton commission, in conjunction with two key
assignments. In 1893 she had been named an official photographer for the World’s
Columbian Exposition in Chicago. Working alongside Smillie, Henry Harris,
and Charles Dudley Arnold (the chief photographer), she honed her skills; together
they produced over seven hundred large (eight-by-ten-inch) and even larger
(eleven-by-fourteen and twenty-by-twenty-four-inch) views of the Exposition.21
Bringing her still closer to her work at Hampton, in the spring of 1899 Johnston
was invited to photograph the Washington, D.C., public school system for the
1900 Paris Exposition. Visiting eight of its eleven divisions, including two that
were “integrated” (but still had racially segregated classrooms), she produced
350 eight-by-ten-inch photographs within a six-week timeframe.
But for the color of their skin, the Washington, D.C., students in the
vast majority of these images bear a striking resemblance to those at Hampton
(figs. 2 and 3). Although the pedagogical methodology was similar in both cases,
Johnston and her contemporaries would not have expected black and white
children to have the same bright futures. And while Johnston’s photographs of
white students and those she would make at Hampton before the end of the
year were both exhibited in Paris, the former illustrated a new pedagogical model
in the Palace of Education and Instruction, while the latter served primarily as
evidence of African American progress in the American Negro Exhibit.22
Seeking a broader audience for her photographs of Washington, D.C.,
schools, Johnston also started to coproduce a series of small books, titled The
New Education Illustrated, using her images alongside impassioned texts by
Edith C. Westcott, a school principal in the city.23 Johnston was deeply immersed
in the new methods of teaching, which promoted active, hands-on learning

Fig. 2. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON

Untitled (class exercising with barbells, Washington, D.C.). 1899
Cyanotype, 7 1⁄2 x 9 7⁄16 in. (19.1 x 24 cm)
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Fig. 3. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON

Untitled (schoolchildren measuring and sketching, Washington, D.C.). 1899
Cyanotype, 7 3⁄16 x 9 7⁄16 in. (18.3 x 24 cm)
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

10
 Fig. 4. Spread from Edith C. Westcott, The New Education Illustrated,
no. 3, Geography. Richmond, Va.: B. F. Johnson, 1900
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

(science experiments, art projects, field trips, and physical activity) in lieu of the
rote memorization associated with traditional educational methods. The images
reproduced in these books suggest that Johnston was refining her technique as
she went, eliminating jumbles of figures (fig. 4) in favor of intentionally spaced
arrangements. Her increasingly careful composition ensured that the students
conveyed their eager attention by the stillness of their pose and the meticu-
lously calibrated angle of their gaze.
Johnston’s work documenting educational institutions and her increas-
ing renown led to the Hampton commission, which was confirmed by the princi-
pal of the Institute in November 1899.24 The project’s success was such that she
was subsequently invited to do similar work for two schools with a very similar
educational philosophy as Hampton: the Carlisle Indian School, in 1901, and
Tuskegee Institute, in 1902 and 1906 (figs. 5 and 6). Johnston also continued
to establish her international reputation as an artist. This was reflected in an
invitation to address the Third International Congress of Photo­graphy (which
took place in Paris during the run of the 1900 Exposition), for which Johnston
also organized a group exhibition showcasing American women photographers.
She later opened a studio in New York with her companion Mattie Edwards
Hewitt, and went on to focus increasingly on architectural photography, docu-
menting many buildings of the American South before retiring to New Orleans
in 1945, where she died, aged eighty-eight, in 1952.

11
 Fig. 5. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON
Conversation Lesson: Subject—The Chair.
Indian Industrial School, Carlisle, Pennsylvania. 1901
Cyanotype, 7 1⁄16 x 8 5⁄8 in. (17.9 x 21.9 cm)
Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress
12
Fig. 6. FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON
The Harness Shop. Tuskegee Institute, Tuskegee, Alabama. 1902
Platinum print mounted on board, 6 3⁄4 x 9 3⁄16 in. (17.1 x 23.4 cm)
The Social Museum Collection, Department of Photographs,
Harvard Art Museums
At Hampton, I not only learned that it was not a disgrace to labour, but
learned to love labour, not alone for its financial value, but for labour’s own
sake and for the independence and self-reliance which the ability to do some-
thing which the world wants done brings.25
—BOOKER T. WASHINGTON (1901)
There were five courses of instruction offered at the Hampton Normal and
Agricultural Institute for the academic year 1899–1900, each described in depth
in its annual catalogue: Academic, Normal, Special Agriculture, Business, and
Electrical, complemented by three departments of industrial training. As its
name suggests, Hampton’s primary goals were to help students develop agri-
cultural expertise and to train future teachers (the meaning of normal in this
context). Small wonder, then, that the album includes many images classified
as “Agriculture” (nearly one-fifth of the album; see pp. 130 to 159) or made at
the Whittier School, a primary school on the Hampton campus “afford[ing] nor-
mal students abundant opportunity for the study of the theory and practice of
teaching” (see pp. 61 to 69).26 Though the school’s administration emphasized
the practical aspects of the curriculum, students also received instruction in
geography, literature, history, music, drawing, and gymnastics. The core of The
Hampton Album illustrates not only this range, but also the progressive meth-
ods by which these subjects were taught, with field trips, hands-on classroom
activities, and relatively informal exchanges between teachers and students (see
pp. 72 to 128).
Changes to the civics curriculum at the turn of the century suggest
the school’s attentiveness to contemporary pedagogical debates and its will-
ingness to incorporate current scholarship. In 1898–99 the class relied on only
two textbooks: Jesse Macy’s Our Government (1896) and J. Laurence Laughlin’s
Elements of Political Economy (1887). The following year the course description
was expanded to invoke the “moral obligations of the citizen and the officer in
relation to the state and to society . . . with special attention to such principles as
condition survival and progress in the Negro and Indian races.” 27 To accommo-
date this engagement with questions of race, five texts were added, including Du
Bois’s The Philadelphia Negro (1899) and Washington’s Future of the American
Negro (1899). The divergent visions of these two towering figures were yet to
harden publicly, but their fundamental differences were already clear. In his text,
Du Bois acknowledged that students might need some “technical training . . .
to master the present methods of living in some particular way,” but his own
education at Fisk and Harvard Universities suggested to him that it was equally
necessary to give the “most promising” students “a training designed above all
to make them men of power, of thought, of trained and cultivated taste; men who
know whither civilization is tending and what it means.”28
In spite of including Du Bois along with Washington in its civics cur-
riculum, Hampton Institute was, of course, by no means a neutral party in this
debate. In the January 1900 issue of The Southern Workman and Hampton
School Record—the Hampton Institute’s monthly newsletter—the editors
breathlessly announced: “Just as we go to press, there comes to our notice an
able and appreciative article on Hampton Institute and its work, by [the
African American classicist] Prof. W. S. Scarborough of Wilberforce University,
printed in The Colored American of Washington. This strong plea for the
Negro’s acknowledgement of the importance of industrial training for his race,
coming as it does from the foremost Negro Greek scholar in the country,
deserves careful reading and cordial response on the part of those who are
inclined to criticize Hampton’s methods.” 29
Some of the reasons for the criticisms of Hampton as too limited in both
its ideals and its ambition are embedded in the nature of its origin. Hampton
had been founded in 1868 by General Samuel Chapman Armstrong, the son of two
white missionaries. He was born on the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii) in 1839,
and it was there he witnessed the “success” of an educational system anchored
in manual labor, which clarified for him the goal of a school whose “graduates
are to be not only good teachers, but skilled workers, able to build homes and earn
a living for themselves and encourage others to do the same.”30 Armstrong led
regiments of African American troops during the Civil War, which convinced him
of “the excellent qualities and capacities of the freedmen.” With a well-intentioned
but profoundly racist paternalism, he continued, “Their quick response to good
treatment and to discipline, was a constant surprise. Their tidiness, devotion to
their duty and their leaders, their dash and daring in battle, and ambition to
improve—often studying their spelling books under fire—showed that slavery was
a false, though doubtless, for the time being, an educative condition, and that they
deserved as good a chance as any people.”31 His description of slavery as “educa-
tive” here starkly reveals the racist underpinnings of Armstrong’s worldview, not
to mention his understanding of the limits of this chance, which would become
fundamental to Du Bois’s later criticisms of the Hampton model.
Armstrong’s ingrained biases also emerge in the school’s approach to
its Native American students.32 Hampton had, in a bold educational experiment
13
(albeit one motivated, at least in part, by financial considerations), begun
accepting Native American students in 1878, but, as Armstrong noted in 1890:
“Our Indian work is illustrative rather than exhaustive. Hampton’s work for the
‘despised races’ of our country, while chiefly for the Negro, is really for all who
need it. Till our limit is reached, any youth in the land, however poor, can come
here and work his way.”33 Despite this idealistic impulse, and the apparent inter-
changeability of Native Americans and African Americans in the before-and-after
sequences at the beginning of The Hampton Album, the institution—like the rest
of the United States in the late nineteenth century—enforced segregation even
among its students: Native Americans and African Americans had separate din-
ing halls, dorms, chapel seating areas, musical ensembles, and sport teams; they
shared little but classrooms.34
We cannot know Johnston’s perspective on the racial politics of
Hampton’s campus, but it is clear she was following a script established by the
school’s administration, described in detail in The Southern Workman: “The
exhibit which Hampton is preparing to send to the Paris Exposition . . . will con-
sist of a series of pictures showing the relation of the various subjects in the
school’s curriculum to the central one of agriculture. . . . It is part of the plan of
the exhibit to contrast the new life among the Negroes and Indians with the old,
and then show how Hampton has helped to produce the change. The old-time Fig. 7. Page (n.p., between 28 and 29) from Fig. 8. Page 39 from Catalogue of the
one-room cabin and the old mule with his rope harness, just tickling the ground Catalogue of the Hampton Normal and Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute,
Agricultural Institute, Hampton, Virginia, for Hampton, Virginia, for the Academic
with a rusty plow, will be contrasted with the comfortable home of the Hampton
the Academic Year 1898–1899. Hampton, Va.: Year 1899–1900. Hampton, Va.:
graduate, the model barn, and the team of strong horses making a deep fur- Hampton Institute Press, 1899 Hampton Institute Press, 1900
row with a heavy plow. The Indian tipi of the past, too, with all that it meant of
nomadic life, will be contrasted with the fixed abode of the young Indian Farmer.”
In conclusion, this description reveals that one of the audiences they wanted to begins a comparative suite of photographs of Native Americans, all printed by
persuade was closer to home: “The value of such an exhibit lies not only in show- Johnston but taken by students or members of the Hampton Camera Club (see
ing to others but in making clear to the school itself what it is doing.”35 pp. 38 to 49).36 Their sequence and titles clarify their exemplary nature too, so,
A clue as to how Johnston worked with Hampton to tell its own story for instance, Without Education: Mrs. Black Nail and Child; Sioux precedes With
is evident in the composition of The Hampton Album. At least a dozen images Education: Kate H. McCaw and Family; A Hampton Graduate. These are followed
from the opening sequence were not printed from negatives made by Johnston, seamlessly by five pairs of before-and-after photographs made by Johnston on
but from her copy prints of images in Hampton’s archives. The album opens with or near the Hampton campus in 1899–1900, among them The Old Well and The
a portrait of Armstrong (who died in 1893), followed by a portrait of Hollis Burke Improved Well (Three Hampton Grandchildren).37 These images are fascinating if
Frissell, the principal when Johnston took her pictures. Three photographs of the somewhat crude caricatures, not only in the clarity of their moral system but also
school’s waterfront campus ensue, as well as an image of four hundred students in their unapologetically didactic intention.
gathered in the Memorial Chapel (each made by Johnston from larger nega- Hampton was acutely aware of the value of Johnston’s pictorial chroni-
tives, and bleeding off the page). With these establishing shots complete, there cle. In January 1900, an editorial in The Southern Workman reported: “The month

14
of December was unusual for the constant charm and beauty of its warm golden
days, Indian summer having lingered considerably beyond its usual limits. . . . This
fine weather was exceedingly favorable for the making of photographs, to which
everything else in the school’s program was subservient for the time being.” The
author noted: “These pictures . . . constitute a pretty complete pictorial represen-
tation of the various activities of the school, and the making of them was the chief
event in the early part of December.”38 Hampton used her images to accompany a
series of articles in The Southern Workman, as well as to illustrate the Institute’s
annual catalogue. A comparison with the vignetted photographs from earlier edi-
tions of this publication illuminates Johnston’s particular aptitude for translat-
ing Hampton’s educational philosophy into images (figs. 7 and 8). Dressmaking is
no longer a deskbound task but an active experience in which students perform
each element of the process. Johnston’s A Cooking Lesson (p. 124) reveals her
technical skills and aesthetic priorities: controlling the lighting by raising the
window shades at the back of the classroom, and guiding the students’ placement
and gaze to convey their absorption in the task at hand.
Johnston’s photographs embody a sense of promise and possibility so
naturally that we might overlook the fact that many of the trades taught were on
the verge of obsolescence, as would become increasingly evident with the rapid
speed of industrialization and mass production.39 Before long, modern plumb- Fig. 9. JAMES VAN DER ZEE
ing would render even the “improved well” a thing of the past; cars and tractors Whittier Preparatory School, Phoebus, Virginia. 1907. Plate 2 from
the portfolio James Van Der Zee: Eighteen Photographs, 1905–1938.
would greatly diminish the need for horse harnesses; spinning and weaving
Washington, D.C.: Graphics International, 1974.
were already largely taking place in factories. It was a nostalgic, almost pastoral Gelatin silver print, printed by Richard Benson, 5 3⁄4 x 7 3⁄8 in. (14.6 x 18.7 cm)
vision of harmonious living with the land. Nevertheless, the conviction that the Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

Hampton model presented the right path for advancement is mirrored in the
solid structure of Johnston’s images and the acquiescence signaled by the taut
poses of students and faculty alike.
Their demeanor also raises broader questions about how the students
would have related to Johnston as a white woman.40 A comparison to a similar
image by James Van Der Zee is perhaps revealing here. In 1907, roughly a decade
before he established his own commercial photography studio in Harlem, he
spent a year in Hampton. While the images he took there lack the technical and
artistic virtuosity of his mature work, a dramatic distinction between his images
and Johnston’s is immediately apparent: in Van Der Zee’s photographs, more
than half the students have set aside their lessons and look squarely into the
camera (fig. 9). Were they curious to see a fellow African American operating
the mysterious box perched on a tripod? Had Johnston or the school forbidden
them from looking up from their work, and if so, why?

15

Fig. 10. Photographer unknown.
American Negro Exhibit, Paris Exposition. 1900
Collodion silver print, 9½ x 7 in. (24.1 x 17.8 cm)
W. E. B. Du Bois Papers. Special Collections and University Archives,
University of Massachusetts Amherst Libraries
16
In the adjoining case we find 150 of the finest photographs to be seen any-
where in the exposition. Hampton Institute sent them to tell the story of her
work, and they have served the purpose admirably.41
—THOMAS J. CALLOWAY (1900)
The 1900 Paris Exposition was an important platform for the United States,
for its African American community, and for Johnston. Photography was an
indispensable element of the stories each of these constituencies sought to tell,
and all of them revolved around the emancipatory potential of education. The
United States was, more­over, keen to establish its reputation as a world power,
allocating four times the funding it had for the Exposition a decade prior.42
African Americans were seeking to rectify their consistent marginalization (or
exclusion) from world’s fairs and to have a voice in the representation of their
own narrative.43 The American Negro Exhibit was part of the Palace of Social
Economy, a building devoted to social reform movements, and represented a
joint effort between three African American scholars: Daniel A. P. Murray, assis-
tant librarian at the Library of Congress, Thomas J. Calloway, a young lawyer
who was the primary organizer of the Exhibit, and Du Bois. By being, as Du Bois
put it, “planned and executed by Negroes,”44 it managed to avoid falling into
many of the traps of colonial exhibitions, even if the celebratory tenor precluded
an examination of the failures of Reconstruction and the cruelties and injustices
that continued to be an all-too-present part of the realities of daily life for many
African Americans.
Although the conversations and planning for the Exhibit had been
ongoing, it was only on November 15, 1899, after a direct plea from Booker T.
Washington to President William McKinley, that Calloway received his commis-
sion.45 (Congress formally allocated $15,000 to the display early the following
year.) In December 1899, the editors of The Southern Workman would report:
“The exhibit which Hampton will make at the Paris Exposition is now well under
way. It will consist wholly of photographs, the space allowed being too limited
for any further display. These will be made by Miss Frances B. Johnston, an art-
ist of high rank in Washington, D.C. There will be about a hundred and fifty of
them, grouped under the leading subjects in the school’s courses of study, and
mounted upon the folding leaves of [a] large cabinet.”46 Four other educational
institutions had also been invited to submit displays,47 and Du Bois developed
an extensive study of the circumstances of African Americans in Georgia, with
albums of photographs and stunning graphic charts (figs. 10 and 11 a–c).48
 Fig. 11 a–c. W. E. B. DU BOIS
The Georgia Negro; City and Rural Population, 1890; Number of Negro Students
Taking the Various Courses of Study Offered in Georgia Schools. 1900
Ink and watercolor on board, each 28 x 22 in. (71 x 56 cm)
Daniel A. P. Murray Collection. Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress

In May, Calloway informed Johnston that the Hampton display was
“attracting considerable attention and has had many favorable comments.”
He continued, “Personally, I regard it as the finest collection of photographs in
the exhibition.”49 He was also corresponding with Frissell: “You will perhaps be
interested to know that your exhibit, from the Hampton Institute, is attracting
a very lively attention from the visitors to the Exposition. . . . I have observed a
number of people to spend an hour studying the pictures, and then to express a
wish for more time.”50 In August 1900 Calloway wrote to Frissell again to convey
the news that the Hampton display had been awarded a Grand Prix.51
The American Negro Exhibit was itself also awarded a Grand Prix
and more than a dozen other medals and honorable mentions. In the United
States, it was enthusiastically described to an attentive African American audi-
ence, largely in African American newspapers and journals. Calloway had man-
aged to establish common ground for the differing perspectives on education,

17
and everyone (organizers, audience, and press) seemed keen to celebrate
achievement rather than dwell upon whatever grim realities they faced back
home. As Du Bois would conclude of the Exhibit as a whole:

We have thus, it may be seen, an honest, straightforward exhibit of a

small nation of people, picturing their life and development without
apology or gloss, and above all made by themselves. In a way this marks
an era in the history of the Negroes of America. It is no new thing for
a group of people to accomplish much under the help and guidance of
a stronger group. . . . When, however, the inevitable question arises,
What are these guided groups doing for themselves? There is in the
whole building no more encouraging answer than that given by the
American negroes, who are here shown to be studying, examining, and
thinking of their own progress and prospects.52

The response to the exhibition was so positive that plans were put in place
to ship it to Buffalo, New York, in time for the Pan-American Exposition of 1901
(fig. 12). With evident relief, Calloway wrote from Buffalo to a member of the
Hampton staff: “I am here engaged in reinstalling the special exhibit as shown at
Paris. The very fine collection of photos of Hampton are in position and seem not
to have suffered from the double sea voyage and much handling.” 53 Later that
year, the same display was shipped to Charleston, South Carolina, where it was
shown in the South Carolina Inter-State and West Indian Exposition.
These displays were forgotten in the years to follow, however, so when
Kirstein recalled his discovery of the album during World War II, he mused,
“How it had suffered its present decline, since it obviously had been put together
with love and care, remained a mystery, together with the cause of its incep-
tion, its intention and its authorship.”54 To solve this mystery, Grace M. Mayer,
curator in the Department of Photography at The Museum of Modern Art, was
dispatched to Hampton in July 1965. John Szarkowski, then director of the
department, wrote to her: “It would of course be terribly interesting if you could
find out anything about the photographer himself, what his background and
working situation was, and what other work he might have done, etc.”55 (He was
assuming, of course, that the photographer was a man.) A week later, Wheeler
wrote to Kirstein: “I have just received a note from Grace Mayer from Hampton,
Virginia, saying that she has disproved Hampton’s theory that [photographer
and teacher at Hampton Institute Leigh Richmond] Miner was the photographer
Fig. 12. Cover of James A. Ross, Souvenir of the Negro Exhibit,
Pan-American Exposition. Buffalo, N.Y.: Globe and Freeman, 1901
and has conclusive evidence that they were taken by a well-known Washington
woman photographer, Frances B. Johnston.”56
While we still don’t know quite why the album was bound, or for whom,
we are now better informed about the when and where of its creation (see “A
Note on the Prints,” pp. 194–95).57 Ever since the Museum unbound the album
in 1965 we have known that an issue of The Southern Workman was used as
scrap paper to provide support for its spine. We now know it was the November
1900 issue, so the album was constructed—likely at Hampton, where copies
of the newsletter would have been abundant—after the Paris Exposition had
closed, using prints made from the same negatives. The featured articles in
that issue are both a poignant reflection of that moment (“Discrimination”;
“An Appeal for Justice”; “Put Yourself in His Place”) and an unfortunate mirror
of our own.

18
All in all, the whole story is an educational, sociological and historical prob-
lem which is very interesting in itself, but which is extremely complex and
which I have absolutely no background for. . . . To do the sort of job befitting
the Museum of Modern Art’s high standards would take a far longer time
spent at Hampton than I can spend. . . . There should be a summary of the
significance of Hampton in the movement for negro education. This is not
an easy thing to do, although it might be a very short summary; I have read
enough to see that it is a complex subject, and the Missionary background
does not make it any less so. Primarily, you need an enlightened sociologist,
who can write well. . . 58
—LINCOLN KIRSTEIN (1965)

In spite of these misgivings (a great comfort to this writer), Kirstein was ulti-
mately persuaded to author the Museum’s first publication of selections from
The Hampton Album in 1966. Perhaps to preempt some of the criticism he felt
might be forthcoming, he wrote in the foreword, “It is more than likely that social
and historical factors outweigh purely aesthetic values in Miss Johnston’s plates,
but here, upon the limited wall-space of a museum and within the few pages
of this brochure, let us, primarily, discover these pictures. They are amazingly
evocative.”59 This implicit privileging of aesthetic appreciation over historical or
documentary value has been frequently criticized since: one author suggested
that Kirstein’s approach (and, by extension, the accompanying exhibition) relied
upon a misreading of the images by treating them “as documents of a naïve his-
torical past.”60 But in fact, although he foregrounded their pictorial qualities,
and his adulatory assessment of the school notwithstanding (“its subsequent
history has more than amply fulfilled all promises Miss Johnston captured in
1899 and 1900”),61 it is clear that Kirstein appreciated the historical complexities
embedded in these photographs: “Without overt irony, we have the helpless
yet not hopeless discrepancy in concept of the white Victorian ideal as criterion
towards which all darker tribes and nations must perforce aspire.” 62
The prints in the Museum’s modestly scaled exhibition were matted
and hung in one line within a single gallery (fig. 13). Each was in its own frame,
with the exception of two sets of four images inserted into longer panoramic
frames. These frames appear to have been used in at least two preceding exhi-
bitions, so it seems fair to assume that this decision was guided by practical
considerations rather than, as some critics have argued, an attempt to dictate a
particular reading.63 In his wall text (distilled from the book’s foreword), Kirstein
Fig. 13. Installation view of The Hampton Album, The Museum of Modern Art,
New York, January 11–April 10, 1966
vividly exemplifies a paradox of both photography and exhibition displays,
which both transpose a depiction of a particular moment into a context at some
remove from the real world. His language betrays a keen awareness of what
happens as the students at Hampton are extracted from their original time and
place and transformed into images, objects, and symbols, noting that they
“continue their essential lives . . . locked in the suspension of time, like flies in
amber, but nevertheless alive in the translucent air of history. They stand
as metaphor or parable in their sturdy dreaminess, their selfless absorption in
self-improvement.” 64 At the same time, such poetic eloquence now seems
part of the reason the show did so little to address the new educational methods
Johnston’s photographs were intended to illustrate or the complex history of
American race relations in the late nineteenth century, let alone the intensity of
the struggles for racial equality in the mid-1960s.
There were only a handful of contemporary reviews, and although few
of these explicitly alluded to the civil rights movement, several offer evidence of
how controversial the exhibition was at the time. The local paper from Hampton
was the most defensive: “Although impetuous integrationists today might reject
the book as being too ‘Uncle Tom,’ here is indeed a fine record of the coming age

19
of Hampton Institute.” 65 The least charitable was the critic for The New York
Times Book Review. With no time for the earnest respect with which the school,
Johnston, and the organizers of the Paris Exposition had approached the photo-
graphs, he called The Hampton Album “a remarkable piece of precious, nostalgic
propaganda.” (This was, one might answer, precisely their point.) “The selec-
tions,” he continued, “are a fascinating, campy comment on how one well-
intentioned group tried to improve the lot of the freed Negro and the American
Indian—and a reminder of every similarly phony, dreadful photo assignment I
ever sweated through.” 66
The author of the most extensive review (in The Reporter, a liberal
New York–based biweekly magazine) made no effort to disguise his very personal
response to the photographs: “They radiate such innocence and good hope
that they make me want to cry.”67 After a short recap of the debate between
Washington and Du Bois, he concluded, “If all of this seems dated and much of it
pathetic, if we see Frances Johnston’s photographs differently from the way
she saw them, we must still ask the question: Was there any other way in 1900?”
He noted that at the time “the Virginia legislature had just . . . pass[ed] a Jim
Crow law applying to passengers on the railroads. Lynchings still occurred at the
rate of more than a hundred a year in the nation, and one out of every five people
in Virginia was illiterate.”68
In general, the reception of the 1966 exhibition also speaks to a growing
skepticism about the truth value of images characterized as documentary. Less
than a decade after MoMA displayed The Hampton Album, Szarkowski orga-
nized Photographs from the Harvard Social Ethics Collection, including three of
Johnston’s photographs made at Tuskegee and two from Hampton (although
these two were more likely made by Leigh Richmond Miner; see “A Note on the
Prints”). In that exhibition’s press release, Szarkowski acknowledged that, com-
pared to Johnston’s generation, “we are less quick to believe that a photograph
tells us the truth. We are accustomed to thinking of the documentary mode as
an aesthetic system, and we are aware of the fact that a photographer’s aesthetic
prejudices—conscious or unconscious—shape the nature of his pictures’ true
content. . . . Nevertheless the value and the fascination of these pictures depend
on their factuality. However selective, fragmentary, and ambiguous their final
meanings, they describe, in the manner of photography, a unique and revealing
section view through the body of the evidence.”69 Like Kirstein, Szarkowski was
wary of the presumed transparency of images such as Johnston’s, while still treat-
ing them as evidence of a bygone time and place.
20
[I] have other concerns, concerns about the very nature of representation,
about who makes and who looks, who decides, etc. These are contemporary
concerns of a critical nature, and they are questions that allow me to be pro-
foundly engaged with both the past and the future.70
—CARRIE MAE WEEMS (2000)
In 2000, the exhibition Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project opened at
the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, Massachusetts.71 Using
Johnston’s Hampton photographs as a point of departure, the show was a multi-
sensory installation with layers of image, sound, and text suggesting the tangled
histories of representation, speech, and authorship (fig. 14). Johnston’s photo-
graphs were enlarged on diaphanous sheets of muslin alongside other images
mostly uncovered by Weems in the Hampton Archives, suspended from the ceil-
ing or adhered to the walls, and visitors wandered through this immersive experi-
ence while reading Weems’s words superimposed on the images and hearing her
melodic voice read a layered, poetic elegy: “Before the end of authenticity and the
beginning of cultural tourism / Before your image and mission furniture became
highly collectible and museums crammed their vaults with your baskets & beads
& bones / Before dashed hopes, lost dreams & the endless weeping of women /
Before any and all of this, before any and all of this, before any and all of this . . .”
Weems employed a strategy that complicated—or indeed, rendered
impossible—any singular understanding of Johnston’s work. She repurposed
photographs from the archives, creating new contexts and stories around the
likenesses of former students. Hampton University declined to be a part of the
exhibition’s tour, a decision that was defended in a statement by the director of
its own museum, Jeanne Zeidler, in the accompanying catalogue. Zeidler argued
that “the more objectionable part of Weems’s work [was] that the artist appropri-
ated images of real people who had/have real lives and real stories, and decreed
meaning that may or may not fit the facts of those individual lives.” Weems’s use
of the Hampton photographs was seen as antithetical to Hampton’s goal of “pre-
sent[ing] history and culture from the perspective and in the voice of those who
have lived it.”72 New York Times critic Holland Cotter opined: “This is too bad.
The Hampton story, like many others in post-Civil War America, was a compli-
cated one, made up of successes, failures and countless shadings in between
that are only now being fully understood. . . . Hampton could only have enhanced
its own reputation as an intellectual forum by having her installation appear
there, then questioning it if it chose.”73 Indeed, Johnston’s photographs seem

Fig. 14. Installation view of Carrie Mae Weems: The Hampton Project
Williams College Museum of Art, Williamstown, Mass., March 4–October 22, 2000
to withstand, and even to benefit from, presentation in a wide range of circum-
stances: in the context of the World’s Fair in 1900 as evidence of American “suc-
cess” in addressing its “Negro problem,” in academic settings that bring forth
questions of pedagogical philosophy, in art museums that foreground a predom-
inantly aesthetic analysis, or as part of another artist’s work. The way in which
all of these issues are understood is naturally connected to the environment in
which the works are seen.
What does this mean for a book published in 2019? Can this tome
encourage close, careful observation of the images, fostering individual
responses to work that can be reexamined at will? Can these photographs help
us grapple with our responsibility to question the uses to which the “truths”
of documentary photography are put? What do they tell us today about what we
want of photographs, and why? Can this publication help us see why the debate
between Washington and Du Bois continues to resonate in the current political
climate and why racism is so ingrained in American politics and society? 74
How can we, how should we balance the aesthetic and the documentary aspects
of Johnston’s work? Among the possible responses to a sustained engagement
with this album, in the face of continuing segregation and inequality, is the sense
of gratitude that LaToya Ruby Frazier described when we looked at these photo-
graphs and discussed her contribution to this book: “I’m indebted to a woman I’ll
never meet, whose work nevertheless remains a powerful springboard for tack-
ling what we think education is today—and how we need to radically change it.”75
21
 Notes
The title of this essay, written on the black­board
in two of Johnston’s images (see pp. 98 and
100 [detail p. 6]), is a quotation from Herbert
Spencer, who in the late 1850s argued against
the prevalent, humanities-centric model of edu-
cation, writing that “for discipline, as well as for
guidance, science is of chiefest value. In all its
effects, learning the meaning of things, is better
than learning the meaning of words. . . . To the
question with which we set out—What knowledge
is of most worth?—the uniform reply is—Science.”
Herbert Spencer, What Knowledge Is of Most
Worth? [1859] (New York: J. B. Alden, 1884), 79.
1 According to the school census for the week
ending October 21, 1899, there were 673 board-
ers (263 girls and 410 boys; 129 of whom were
Native Americans) and 320 younger day stu-
dents enrolled at the Whittier School. Southern
Workman and Hampton School Record 28, no. 11
(November 1899): 441.
2 See Elisabetta Bini, “Drawing a Global Color
Line: ‘The American Negro Exhibit’ at the 1900
Paris Exposition,” in Moving Bodies, Displaying
Nations: National Cultures, Race and Gender in
World Exhibitions, Nine­teenth to Twenty-First
Century, ed. Guido Abbattista (Trieste: Edizioni
Università di Trieste, 2014), 25–52; Jeannene
M. Pryzblyski, “American Visions at the Paris
Exposition, 1900: Another Look at Frances Ben-
jamin Johnston’s Hampton Photographs,” Art
Journal 57, no. 3 (fall 1998): 60–68; and Deborah
Willis and David Levering Lewis, A Small Nation
of People: W. E. B. Du Bois and African American
Portraits of Progress (Washington, D.C.: Library
of Congress, 2003).
3 See James D. Anderson, “The Hampton Model of
Normal School Industrial Education, 1868–1915,”
in The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–
1935 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2010), 33–78.
4 W. E. B. Du Bois, “Of Mr. Booker T. Washington
and Others” [1903], in The Souls of Black Folk
(New York: Penguin Classics, 2018), 40 and 42.
5 For a thoughtful contextualization of Washington
and Du Bois’s methodological debates see
Manning Marable, Black Leadership: Four Great
American Leaders and the Struggle for Civil
22
Rights (New York: Columbia University Press,
1998) and Jacqueline M. Moore, Booker T. Wash-
ington, W. E. B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial
Uplift, The African American History Series 1
(Wilmington, Del.: Scholarly Resources, 2003).
6 “Hampton University: Chronology of Events,”
http://oar.hamptonu.edu/media/docs/20140116_
153637_Hampton%20University%20Chronology.
pdf, accessed October 31, 2018.
7 James Guimond, “Frances Johnston’s Hampton
Album: A White Dream for Black People,” in
American Photography and the American Dream
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1991), 47–48.
8 See, for example, Robert J. Norrell, Up from
History: The Life of Booker T. Washington (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2009).
9 Data compiled by Tuskegee Institute shows there
were more than 1,500 recorded lynchings in the
1890s alone. See http://archive.tuskegee.edu/
archive/handle/123456789/511, accessed October
30, 2018. The legacy of slavery and the history of
lynching and their connection to contemporary
problems of mass incarceration and police vio-
lence are explored in The Legacy Museum: From
Enslavement to Mass Incarceration, an institu-
tion that opened in Montgomery, Alabama, in
2018, under the aegis of Bryan Stevenson’s Equal
Justice Initiative. See https://museumand
memorial.eji.org, accessed November 20, 2018.
10 Laura Wexler, Tender Violence: Domestic Visions
in an Age of U.S. Imperialism (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 150.
11 Lincoln Kirstein, foreword to The Hampton
Album (New York: The Museum of Modern Art,
1966), 5.
12 Ibid.
13 Kirstein and Wheeler were longtime friends,
having been introduced to one another by the
photographer George Platt Lynes.
14 The accompanying catalogue included one
additional image: Geography: Lesson on Local
Industries . . . (p. 92). The prints were on view at
The Museum of Modern Art, New York, from
January 11 to April 10, 1966, and traveled to eleven
additional venues between July 1966 and Decem-
ber 1968: Cornell University, Ithaca, N.Y.; The
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; Illinois Institute
of Technology, Chicago; The College of Idaho,
Caldwell, Idaho; University of Texas, El Paso;
Long Island University, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Hampton
Institute, Hampton, Va.; University of Manitoba,
Winnipeg, Canada; Rochester State Junior
College, Rochester, Minn.; Allen Memorial Art
Museum, Oberlin, Ohio; and the University of
British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.
15 See Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2017).
16 Frances Benjamin Johnston, “What a Woman
Can Do with a Camera,” Ladies’ Home Journal 14,
no. 10 (September 1897): 6–7.
17 These and other biographic details are drawn
from Maria Elizabeth Ausherman, The Photo-
graphic Legacy of Frances Benjamin Johnston
(Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009),
8–82. See also Bettina Berch, The Woman behind
the Lens: The Life and Work of Frances Benja-
min Johnston, 1864–1952 (Charlottesville: The
University Press of Virginia, 2000); Pete Daniel
and Raymond Smock, A Talent for Detail: The
Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston,
1889–1910 (New York: Harmony Books, 1974); and
Lincoln Kirstein, “A Note on the Photographer,”
in The Hampton Album, 53–55.
18 The address of this studio was 1332 V Street, NW,
Washington, D.C.
19 “Washington Women with Brains and Business,”
Washington Times, April 21, 1895. Quoted in Aus-
herman, Photographic Legacy, 30.
20 See Sarah Hermanson Meister, “Crossing the
Line: Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude
Käsebier as Professionals and Artists” in Modern
Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern
Art, ed. Cornelia Butler and Alexandra Schwartz
(New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2010),
124–39.
21 See Julie K. Brown, “Recovering Representations:
U.S. Government Photographers at the World’s
Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893,” Prologue:
Quarterly of the National Archives and Records
Administration 29, no. 3 (fall 1997): 219–32.
22 See Tova Cooper, “The Scenes of Seeing: Frances
Benjamin Johnston and Visualizations of the
‘Indian’ in Black, White, and Native Educational
Contexts,” American Literature 83, no. 3 (Sep-
tember 2011): 509–45, esp. 514.
23 Westcott and Johnston intended to issue sixteen
numbers between August 1900 and April 1901,
with the B. F. Johnson Publishing Company, Rich-
mond, Va. The first three were subtitled Primary
Education, Arithmetic, and Geography, and were
produced before the end of 1900; the fourth,
Manual Training, appeared in early 1901, and
turned out to be the last.
24 Hollis Burke Frissell to Johnston, November 15,
1899, reel 5, Frances Benjamin Johnston Papers,
Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Wash-
ington, D.C. Johnston describes their arrange-
ment in a letter to Washington (in response to his
request that she photograph Tuskegee):
I received from them [Hampton] $1000.00
and the living expenses of myself and my
assistant [her mother] during a period
of about six weeks. In return I furnished
150 8 x 10 negatives and 450 prints (3
from each plate) for the $750.00, the
additional $250.00 covering the expense
of an almost complete set of duplicate
negatives and many extra prints. The
plates, of course, remain the exclusive
property of the Hampton Institute.
The season was most unfavorable
and afterwards at Carlisle I did nearly
the same amount of work in about half
the time.
Johnston to Washington, August 11, 1902, in The
Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R. Harlan
and Raymond W. Smock, vol. 6, 1901–2 (Cham-
paign: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 501.
25 Booker T. Washington, Up from Slavery [1901]
(New York: Infinity, 2015), 41.
26 Catalogue of the Hampton Normal and Agricul-
tural Institute, Hampton, Virginia, for the Aca-
demic Year 1898–99 (Hampton, Va.: Hampton
Institute Press, 1899), 28.
27 Catalogue of the Hampton Normal and Agricul-
tural Institute, Hampton, Virginia, for the Aca-
demic Year 1899–1900 (Hampton, Va.: Hampton
Institute Press, 1900), 37.
28 Quoted in Guimond, American Photography, 47.
29 Southern Workman and Hampton School Record
29, no. 1 (January 1900): 11.
30 Samuel Chapman Armstrong, Twenty-Two
Years’ Work of the Hampton Normal and
 Agricultural Institute at Hampton, Virginia
(Hampton, Va.: Hampton Normal School Press,
1893), 2.
31 Ibid., 2–3.
32 See Robert F. Engs, “Red, Black, and White: A
Study in Intellectual Inequality,” in Region, Race,
and Reconstruction, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and
James M. McPherson (New York: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1982), 241–48.
33 Armstrong, Twenty-Two Years’ Work, 9–10.
34 When Armstrong tapped Washington, then a
recent graduate, to live in the Native American
dormitory, it was only until race-specific dorms
could be built. Washington recounts the experi-
ence in Up from Slavery, 54–55.
35 Southern Workman and Hampton School Record
29, no. 1 (January 1900): 8.
36 Recent research into the Hampton Institute’s
Camera Club has provided useful information
about their authorship and production. See
Ray Sapirstein, “Out from behind the Mask: Paul
Laurence Dunbar, the Hampton Institute
Camera Club, and Photographic Performance
of Identity,” in Pictures and Progress: Early
Photography and the Making of African American
Identity, ed. Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn
Michelle Smith (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2012), 167–203.
37 To make these Johnston was likely escorted by
members of the Hampton Institute Camera
Club (chartered in 1893 as the Kiquotan Kamera
Klub) whose members—mostly white faculty and
staff—often photographed in the surrounding
area.
38 Southern Workman and Hampton School Record
29, no. 1 (January 1900): 11.
39 C. Vann Woodward made this point in his study
Origins of the New South, 1877–1913 (Baton Rouge:
Louisiana State University Press, 1951), 365–67.
Quoted in Guimond, American Photography, 43.
40 Discussing “the gaze” in the context of “the rac-
ist discourse of sexual assault,” Shawn Michelle
Smith has drawn attention to how Johnston “rep-
resented both a threat and a potentially powerful
advocate for young African Americans.” Shawn
Michelle Smith, “Photographing the ‘American
Negro’: Nation, Race, and Photography at the
Paris Expostion of 1900,” in American Archives:
Gender, Race, and Class in Visual Culture (Princ-
eton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999),
169–70.
41 Thomas J. Calloway, “The American Negro
Exhibit at the Paris Exposition,” Colored Ameri-
can (Washington, D.C.), November 3, 1900, 9.
42 Bini, “Drawing a Global Color Line,” 25–52, esp.
43–46.
43 African Americans had been widely ignored as
potential planners of the 1893 World’s Colum-
bian Exposition in Chicago. Activist Ida B. Wells
self-published twenty thousand copies of a
pamphlet titled The Reason Why the Colored
American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Expo-
sition (1893), which was also printed in French
and German; Frederick Douglass wrote the
introduction.
44 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The American Negro at Paris,”
The American Monthly Review of Reviews 22, no.
5 (November 1900): 576.
45 Washington to McKinley, October 24, 1899,
in Booker T. Washington Papers, ed. Louis R.
Harlan and Raymond W. Smock, vol. 5, 1899–
1900 (Champaign: University of Illinois Press,
1976), 244. See also Calloway, “American Negro
Exhibit,” 2.
46 Southern Workman and Hampton School Record
28, no. 12 (December 1899): 498.
47 The others being Atlanta University, Fisk Univer-
sity, Howard University, and Tuskegee Institute.
48 A number of scholars have considered this dis-
play; in addition to those previously cited, see
Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds.,
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black
America; The Color Line at the Turn of the Twen-
tieth Century (New York: Princeton Architectural
Press, 2018); Shawn Michelle Smith, “‘Looking
at One’s Self through the Eyes of Others’: W. E. B.
Du Bois’s Photographs for the 1900 Paris
Exposition,” African American Review 34, no. 4
(winter 2000): 581–99.
49 Calloway to Johnston, May 15, 1900, reel 5,
Frances Benjamin Johnston Papers, Manuscript
Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.
50 Calloway to Frissell, May 24, 1900, Hampton
University Archives, Hampton, Va.
51 To ensure the magnitude of this achievement was
not lost, he explained that the Grand Prix was the
“highest award granted to any exhibitor, being
higher than a gold medal. You will better appre-
ciate this when you understand that of the entire
awards going to the United States there were
only 216 ‘Grand Prix’ and one of those to your
institution.” Calloway to Frissell, August 23, 1900,
Hampton University Archives, Hampton, Va.
52 Du Bois, “The American Negro at Paris,” 577.
53 Calloway to Cora Folsom, April 16, 1901, Hampton
University Archives, Hampton, Va. Folsom was
officially the Indian Correspondent in Hampton
Institute’s Graduates’ Department but also
responsible for external representations of the
school’s achievements.
54 Kirstein, The Hampton Album, 5.
55 Szarkowski to Grace M. Mayer, July 7, 1965, The
Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Records,
787.12, The Museum of Modern Art Archives,
New York.
56 Wheeler to Kirstein, July 15, 1965, Monroe
Wheeler Papers, 5.19, The Museum of Modern
Art Archives, New York.
57 Kirstein surmised that it may have been “for pre-
sentation purposes or to interest patrons in the
work of the Institute or as a record of the Paris
exhibition.” Kirstein, The Hampton Album, 8.
58 Kirstein to Wheeler, June 16, 1965, The Museum
of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 787.12, The
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
59 Kirstein, The Hampton Album, 5.
60 See Sarah Bassnett, “From Public Relations to
Art: Exhibiting Frances Benjamin Johnston’s
Hampton Institute Photographs,” History of
Photography 32, no. 2 (summer 2008): 168. In
the same article, Bassnett claims that “Kirstein
and others involved with the MoMA exhibit
were interested in Johnston’s photographs as
illustrations of an historical ideal, which made
it possible to aestheticize them” (p. 162).
61 Kirstein, The Hampton Album, 5.
62 Ibid., 10.
63 See in particular Bettina Berch’s criticism of
Guimond and Wexler for their reliance on the
1966 selection, arguing that it skews any assess-
ment of the project as a whole. Berch, Woman
behind the Lens, 53–54. For further discussions
of sequence and selection see Bassnett, “From
Public Relations to Art,” 160–66; Guimond,
American Photography, 31; and Wexler, Tender
Violence, 135.
64 Lincoln Kirstein, wall label for The Hampton
Album, January 11–April 10, 1966, The Museum
of Modern Art Exhibition Records, 787.6, The
Museum of Modern Art Archives, New York.
65 Alexander C. Brown, “The Hampton Album,”
Daily Press (Newport News, Va.), March 13, 1966.
66 David E. Sherman, “Things and People,” New
York Times Book Review, December 4, 1966, 3.
67 Hennig Cohen, “The Innocent Eye,” The Reporter
34, no. 5 (March 10, 1966): 45.
68 Ibid., 48.
69 Press release, Photographs from the Harvard
Social Ethics Collection (June 17–September 2,
1974), no. 55, The Museum of Modern Art
Exhibition Records, 1065.2, The Museum of
Modern Art Archives, New York.
70 Carrie Mae Weems, interview by Katherine Fogg
and Denise Ramzy, in Carrie Mae Weems:
The Hampton Project, ed. Vivian Patterson (New
York: Aperture in association with Williams
College Museum of Art, 2000), 80.
71 The exhibition, organized by Vivian Patterson,
was on view at the Williams College Museum of
Art, Williamstown, Mass., from March 4 to
October 22, 2000, and traveled between 2001
and 2003 to the International Center of Pho-
tography, New York; The High Museum of Art,
Atlanta, Ga.; The University Museum, California
State, Long Beach, Calif.; The Nelson-Atkins
Museum of Art, Kansas City, Miss.; and The
Hood Museum at Dartmouth College, Hanover,
N.H. It was reinstalled at the Williams College
Museum of Art in 2007.
72 Jeanne Zeidler, “A View from Hampton Univer-
sity Museum” in Patterson, Carrie Mae Weems, 77.
73 Holland Cotter, “Art in Review: Carrie Mae
Weems—‘The Hampton Project’,” New York
Times, March 23, 2001.
74 Jelani Cobb, “Hard Tests: A Historically Black
University in the Age of Trump,” The New Yorker,
January 15, 2018, 44–51.
75 LaToya Ruby Frazier in conversation with the
author and River Bullock, September 15, 2018.
23