“Greetings and Hearty Good Wishes for the New Year from Frances Benjamin Johnston” reads this combination business card, greeting card, and 1904 calendar from photographer Frances Benjamin Johnston. In 1904, Johnston was thirty years old, had a home photo studio in Washington, D.C., at 1332 V Street, and was already well-established in the capital city. She started photographing U.S. presidents and their families starting with Benjamin Harrison in the late 1880s and early 1890s. Her career evolved for decades, and by the time of this card, she was working as a photojournalist, and would later specialize in architecture and landscape photography. But in this moment, she was sending good wishes to friends and potential clients alike, with a photo of herself taken during a trip out West:

My curiosity led me to view this original item. It’s a trifold paper card that was closed with an embossed orange seal, as seen below:

I focused in with one of my colleagues, who spotted Johnston’s initials embossed on the torn seal – F and B. Presumably J was on the missing part:

My quick perusal of additional ephemera in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection turned up a match for the rest of the seal’s imagery. The logo is used on the cover of this small pamphlet from the Curtis Publishing Company, which advertises an 1897 article written by Johnston for The Ladies’ Home Journal, entitled “What a Woman Can Do with a Camera”:

The central symbol of the graphic used on the cover shows the front of a large camera and lens from that era. Note the presence of such a camera in the very home studio Johnston mentions in her greeting card, bringing us full circle:

I’ll echo Ms. Johnston – 120 years later – by sending you all hearty good wishes for the new year!
Learn More:
- Learn about Johnston’s long career: Frances Benjamin Johnston – Biographical Overview and Chronology
- Explore some of the more than 20,000 photos in the Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection including the Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South.
- Revisit past Picture This posts featuring Johnston:
Comments (2)
Nice photos. Thanks for sharing them.
This is great fun to see — an unexpected perspective on a photographer we all admire. I will now see sunflowers as, um, flashguns! Many thanks.