GLR May-June 2025

an adequate basis from which to launch a career. By the same token, women photographers were not automatically obliged to shoulder the burden of an inherited artistic canon with its mas terpieces, celebrated names, and estab lished hierarchies. Potentially, women could share more-or-less equal footing with their male colleagues in an arena whose practices and parameters had yet to be defined. Influential professionals on the in ternational scene included more than a few lesbians. Frances Benjamin John ston, whose partner Mattie Edwards Hewitt was a successful photographer as well, openly advocated photography as a vocation suitable for women. After her return to the U.S. from Paris— where she, too, had studied at the Académie Julian—a family friend, George Eastman (the inventor of the ac cessible Eastman Kodak camera who was probably gay), gave Johnston her

high-wheeled bike marked “male elec tors only.” An androgynous youth rid ing a modern safety bike with lower wheels of equal size overtakes him. The modern bike’s wheels bear the in scription “male and female—equal electoral rights.” The modern rider ex claims in passing: “What a funny old machine. Why don’t you get one like mine?” The photograph of Johnston in male drag posing alongside a high wheeled bicycle playfully weighs in on the equality question: Can women “ride high”? Sure. If they’re men. Johnston’s articles for The Ladies’ Home Journal in the 1880s and early 1900s, such as the one in the Septem ber 1897 issue titled “What a Woman Can Do With a Camera,” explain why “photography as a profession should appeal particularly to women” and offer practical advice to women aspir ing to achieve artistic and financial success in this new field. The U.S.

Fig. 5: Frances Benjamin Johnston. Self-Portrait dressed as a man with false mustache, posed with a bicycle , c. 1890. Library of Congress.

first camera. At Eastman’s urging, Johnston reached out to Thomas Smillie, the director of photography at the Smithsonian in Washington, DC. She would hone the craft of photography under Smillie’s ægis. Both Eastman and Smillie helped to launch Johnston’s career as a professional photographer and photojournalist. The portraits of celebrities and dignitaries that constitute a major portion of Johnston’s professional portfolio, as well as many of her noncommercial photographs, are preserved in col lections at the Smithsonian and the Library of Congress. One portrait (now identified as a “self-portrait,” although the shutter may have been tripped by someone else, possibly Hewitt) shows Johnston sporting form-fitting trousers, a waistcoat, tailored jacket, and a fake mustache, posed alongside a high-wheeled bicycle (Figure 5). In the 1890s, when this picture was taken, the bicycle was widely embraced by women as both a vehicle and an emblem of mobility. It was also implicated in the feminist dress reform movement. Since the prevailing feminine fashions—long skirts, corsets, a bustle—made riding a bike impossible, women cy clists donned “bloomers” or wore trousers beneath skirts. The portrait of Johnston in male drag standing upright beside a bi cycle whose handlebars reach the level of her chest makes it clear that such high-wheeled vehicles were not designed with women’s clothing in mind, not even dress-reform clothing. We can well imagine how the loose fabric of the New Woman’s cy cling trousers could catch catastrophically in the high-wheel’s spokes. The “safety bicycle,” invented in 1888 and industrially pro duced in the 1890s, coincided with a bicycling craze around the Western world, captivating both men and women. The feminist icon Susan B. Anthony (who sat for a portrait in Johnston’s stu dio) considered the modern bicycle an important factor in women’s fight for equal rights. A voting rights poster from the era shows a man decked out in outdated squire’s attire astride a

Census reveals that the number of women who identified them selves as professional photographers rose from 228 in 1870, to 451 in 1880, to 2,201 in 1890, and to 3,580 by 1900, and their ranks continued to swell. In 1900, Johnston organized an im portant exhibition of photographs by women at the International Congress of Photographic in Paris, timed to coincide with the Paris Exposition Universelle for maximum visibility. Although Johnston was officially one of only two women delegates at the International Photographic Congress, the phenomenon that her exhibition represented—women as professional photogra phers—was gaining momentum internationally. Many women photographers of this era whose artistic ac complishment and commercial prowess were recognized in their own time did not earn mention in the histories of art and pho tography written by subsequent generations. The French pho tographer Céline Laguarde offers a case in point. Laguarde was one of the first women practitioners to work outside of the stu dio, lugging heavy equipment to the natural sites that provided the focus of her landscape œuvre. Laguarde took part in most of the major photography exhibitions in Europe and the U.S. at the turn of the century. She spearheaded delegations constituted by the influential Photo-club de Paris to represent France abroad, becoming the principal ambassador for the French pictorialists. Her romantic landscapes typify this school, which defended pho tography as an art form equal to painting or sculpture. Her soft focus photographs were abundantly reproduced in art and photography magazines of the era. When pictorialism went out of fashion after World War I, her name was promptly forgotten. At the same time, male pictorialist peers such as Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Steichen, with whom she had shared the limelight, entered the artistic canon. We can safely assume that women photographers such as Johnston and Laguarde, whose work was buried in archives and museum collections, to be “rediscovered” by contemporary cu rators and scholars, represent a small percentage of the women

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