Self-Portrait as the "New Woman" (1896)

How the picture was made

Johnston made this photograph in her own studio in Washington, D.C., the business she had opened in 1894 after training in photography and darkroom work with Thomas Smillie, the head of photography at the Smithsonian Institution. A self-portrait in a studio was a controlled exercise: she chose the chair, the angle, the props and the moment, and then had the exposure made with herself as the sitter. The Library of Congress dates the print to 1896 and describes it as a gelatin silver print mounted on layered paper, with the photograph itself measuring 19.7 by 15.7 centimeters.

The setting is not a neutral backdrop. Johnston's studio was a social space as well as a workplace. In the 1890s, the Clio exhibit on her life explains, she moved between conventional Washington society and a Bohemian circle of artists and writers, and the studio was where the second of those lives took place. Here the fireplace and mantel become a stage set for a performance of character.

What the photograph shows

Johnston sits in profile facing left, close to the hearth. In one hand she holds a lit cigarette and in the other a beer stein. One leg is crossed over the other, and the hem of her skirt is lifted enough to show a ribbon of petticoat. Each detail was a small provocation in the 1890s, when respectable women were not expected to smoke, drink beer or sit with their legs crossed in front of a camera. Writers have pointed out that the pose itself, relaxed and turned away from the viewer, borrows the seated attitude conventionally reserved for men.

The mantelpiece behind her carries six portraits of men, all photographs Johnston had taken herself. The Library of Congress identifies them, from left to right, as the poet Bliss Carman; A. N. Brown, probably the librarian of the U.S. Naval Academy; Henry Guston Rogers, probably the inventor and playwright Henry Gustave Rogers; the architect James Rush Marshall; the Smithsonian librarian Frank Phister; and L. M. McCormick, a photographer and member of the Capital Camera Club. A Library curator has noted that why these particular men were displayed together remains an open question. Read one way, the row of portraits is a display of her professional work; read another, it puts the men on the shelf while she occupies the center of the picture.

The New Woman

The Library of Congress catalog describes the photograph as Johnston posing as an independent "new woman." The term had wide currency in the mid-1890s: the novelist Sarah Grand used it in an influential 1894 article, and it came to stand for women who sought independence through education, paid work and personal freedom. Cigarettes, bicycles and practical dress were the props most often attached to the type, by supporters and by cartoonists who mocked it.

Johnston was a working example of the idea. She ran her own business, sold photographs to magazines and newspapers, and in 1897 published "What a Woman Can Do with a Camera" in the Ladies' Home Journal, urging women to take up photography as a profession. The self-portrait advertises that identity, but it does so with humor. The props are almost too neatly chosen, and the effect is closer to a knowing costume portrait than a confession.

Why it became famous

The picture belongs to a group of playful self-portraits Johnston made in the 1890s. In others she posed in conventional dress as a proper Victorian lady, and in at least two she dressed as a man with a false moustache, one of them with a bicycle; both cross-dressing pictures are also in this archive. The fireplace portrait has outlasted the rest. The Clio exhibit on Johnston calls it the most frequently reprinted of her self-portraits and notes that historians Pete Daniel and Raymond Smock, whose 1974 book A Talent for Detail revived interest in her work, were probably the first to publish it. They wrote that "three symbols of rebellion against Victorian formality appear in this self-portrait." Later scholars, including Laura Wexler in her book Tender Violence, have continued to analyze it.

Its appeal is easy to see. It is a portrait of a photographer by herself, a document of women's changing roles and a joke shared with the viewer, all in a single frame.

Which print this archive holds

This archive presents the Library of Congress print catalogued as "Frances Benjamin Johnston, full-length portrait, seated in front of fireplace, facing left, holding cigarette in one hand and a beer stein in the other, in her Washington, D.C. studio" (Library of Congress item 98502934), the gelatin silver print on layered paper described above. Other reproductions circulate under titles such as Self-Portrait (as "New Woman") or Self-portrait as a Bohemian woman; they derive from the same image. The archive also holds a separate 1896 photograph of Johnston posed with six members of her family by the same studio fireplace, which shows how the room looked in a more formal family portrait.