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Photo source: Library of Congress, via Vintage Photography, at retro-vintage-photography.blogspot.com

This photograph–a daguerreotype, really–is both extraordinary and terribly common, at the same time, and is so in a way that is difficult to define, just that it is so.  It is the work of Frances Benjamin Johnston (whose collection resides at the Library of Congress) and was completed between 1845-1860, and shows the photographer’s aunts.  They make a formidable group.  I’d like to be able to find the data that the outline of their portraits form, because to me they look lik a graph.

The photographer, Frances Johnston (1864-1952),  was one of America’s first successful female workers in the field of photography and photo-journalism.  She opened a studio around 1890, and went into business, no doubt helped along by her wealthy family’s social clipboard.  That it took 50 years or so and the application of a family’s small fortune to firmly establish a woman at this rank in photography, so close to the year 1900, so far into the advance of photography, is remarkable. The self-portrait, below, shows her mind:

she reveals herself a woman of the modern age, with her petticoats flaring and obvious, a cigarette in one hand, and a beer stein in the other, secrets no longer.