This is a country that has just won a war with
Spain, that has just conquered the Philippines, that's on the cusp of an
international role that believes in itself again for the first time since Civil
War. The North and the South are reuniting. Whether or not they should have
reunited on the terms they did, they are doing that. There has been a fear
that America was losing its vitality. And Johnston and her cohort are finding
the vitality in America. So it's the vision of America which can move into the
next century sure of itself, confident, believing that its dreams, if not true
at the moment, will come true. And that's very much the spirit of the age for
those for whom the age was good.
She doesn't explore the people not doing well. She did go to rural Virginia
and take photographs of poor black people and she did, in fact, in a shocking
incident, get chased out of town because she was with a black man who was
chaperoning her in this rural Virginia town. She was very angry. She tried to
take legal action against this overt act of racism and sexism. But in the
main, Johnston stays away from those scenes. So that's not what we learn from
Johnston.
I think Johnston as an artist photographs more than she knows. She sees through
her camera more than she sees, and that's one of the reasons why when we study
the photographs we can get entre into this period of time, 'cause there's more
in them than she herself could have articulated in that she's a brilliant
photographer.
You'd never get a hint of it from her. She sees a domestic scene on Dewey's
battleship, where another person might have seen the battleship, and this is
very important in her success as a photographer and in understanding what her
vision is, and it doesn't mean that we can't learn a great deal about the time
through that vision.
These are not cynical photographs. There's nothing cynical about Johnston's
photographs ever. Even the play with gender, that's a good-hearted play.
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