November 15, 2019 • 13 mins
Holly and Tracy talk casually about the week's episodes, featuring the photography career of Frances Johnston and the devastation of San Francisco in 1906.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Honey Fry, I'm Tracy Wilson, and
this is our second installment of our little shorties that
we do where we talk about what has been published
(00:22):
on the show. This week kind of a little bit
more of a relaxed, behind the scenes discussion of the topic.
So we're talking about Francis Benjamin Johnston, known more colloquially
as Fanny, and her astonishing photography career. It is astonishing.
One of the things that that came up in the
episode that I thought was maybe worth exploration, but we
(00:46):
are working purely off speculation is the fact that she
was clearly in terms of behavior, very feminist and very
much about moving women forward in terms of having careers.
And she wrote really deep tailed like a how to
essentially of how to start a photography career. She did
not identify as a suffragist or as any part of
(01:07):
the women's rights movement as it was happening in the
late Victorian and early Edwardian eras did you have any
speculation into why that might be? This is all guesswork
and I. My only thought is that because she was
working in Washington, d c. And was working with a
lot of prominent politicians, and was from a family that
(01:28):
was very connected to a lot of politicians. Her father,
for example, we talked about in the episode works for
the Treasury Department. My only thought is that she was
willing to do like the work on the ground, but
she didn't want to make a big statement or stance
and potentially ruffle feathers or mess up any of those
connections which were so vital to her career and really
(01:49):
her family's well being. That's my only guess. But I
love her so much because herself portraits are some of
my favorite photographs I have ever seen in my life.
They are so fun because it really is like, on
the one hand, there's such a wide spectrum of them,
which we described some of them on the show, that
it almost feels like a kid playing dress up, like
(02:09):
it is so many different images of herself as almost
entirely different people. But it also is one of those
things that reminds you that people are myriad, and none
of us is anyone given identity, right right, So, Holly,
you did the research and the writing for this episode,
and the way our process normally works is that Holly
(02:31):
sends me the script and I get the artwork to
go with it on our website. That's sort of one
of our division of labor things on a show. And
so I had only read like the introduction, and I
started a quick search for a photograph to go with it,
because a lot of times it's kind of a big
nebulous thing of is there going to be a picture
for this or not? And the answer is there are
(02:52):
thousands of pictures. They're all over there's a lot of
them that are digitized and available on the web. But
then I replied back to you, having just read that
introduction with the link, saying is this the self portrait
you're talking about in this intro? And you were like yes.
And then, of course I, once I had read through
the whole thing, you described the actual photo and I
was like, well, if I had just hung on for
(03:13):
a minute, I would have known the answer to this question.
No worries at all. Uh. Yeah, I really really love
the fact that Fammi is one of those rare and
unique situations where a lot of her most famous work
is at this point more than a hundred and twenty
years old, but it is still readily available to see online.
(03:34):
Anyone can see her work if they have an Internet connection.
The Library of Congress has the vast majority of her work.
There other libraries and museums that also have some of
her work, but like in terms of the scope of
her work and the amount of it that is digitized,
it is better represented online and in terms of accessibility
(03:54):
than any other photographer from her era I can think of,
and certainly even better than many artists in terms of
things being able to be seen. Uh So, if you
are curious, especially because she did make that really interesting
transition from portraits to architecture and gardens, which is to
(04:14):
me a fascinating gear shift to make kind of midway
through a very lucrative career, it's interesting to look at
how her composition shifts. Uh There is one particular photograph
that she took in the State dining room in the
White House that is so beautiful to me in terms
of light and composition that it reminds me of some
of like my favorite Dutch Golden Age painters in terms
(04:36):
of how they how they use light to focus the eye.
It's really really pretty. Um and a lot of her pictures.
We talked about it in the episode. She was trained
as an artist, so her visual eye is really from
that that ideology and with that education behind it, so
she does tend to create images that look similar in
terms of how light is used and how they're framed
(04:59):
to the way a painter. My and I love that
about them. So one of the things that we talked
about in the episode um was the the pictures that
she took of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and
sort of the evolution of how those have been curated
and explored in terms of our content, because they were
made sort of as a pr move in a way
(05:19):
that was inherently racist, because it was about looking at
this through a very white lens when they were photos
of black and Native American students. And it really reminded
me of a few years ago when you and I
were in Chicago. I walked over to the Field Museum
and they had this exhibit going on that was about
the work of Malvina Hoffman, who had been commissioned to
(05:41):
travel the world and make these sculptures of the people
she found living in all these places, and the sculptures
are beautiful. She took enormous care to try to capture
the humanity and the worth of everybody that she was sculpting.
But the reason she had been commissioned to do it
was for the inherently racist idea of creating a racial
(06:02):
hierarchy at which white people were at the top and
then curating them that way in the museum. And so
this exhibition that I saw in more recent years was
sort of looking back, like how was the field perpetuating
racism with these sculptures? Like how do we look at
the sculptures? How do we look at what the field
was doing with these sculptures? And it really reminded me
(06:24):
of the process that those photos sort of went through
as people have re examined how to look at them
and how to think about them in their context. Yeah,
that's uh. I mentioned in the episode an article that
really breaks down like the three primary exhibitions of those
and how those ideas shifted. I cannot recommend highly enough
that people go check that out. I will make sure
(06:46):
in the sourceless that that is the top one so
it's easy to find um. So hopefully people will go
and explore and also just take a peek at her
her photos which are very fascinating, and like I said,
I mean, I'm clearly a very visual thinker. I don't
think that's a surprise to anyone who's ever listened to
the show for more than twelve minutes. So for me,
like that's such an incredible connection to be able to
(07:08):
have to history and how it has all played out
and to look at some of these problematic ideologies that
were being executed through art. It's something that's hard to
talk about in some ways because you want to consider
them as art and from the point of view of
an artist who is trying to make something beautiful, but
they have meaning and they have import and they have
(07:30):
the potential to be very damaging. So it's it's worthwhile
to kind of walk into that that discussion with an
open mind and really look at those images and think
about that right up and how it breaks them down. Uh. So,
our second episode this week was about the San Francisco
earthquake and fire of N six, which has kind of
been lurking on my list for a while, but then
(07:50):
because it kept coming up. As I mentioned in that episode,
on a recent trip to San Francisco, it felt like
the universe was telling me to just stop dithering about
and just do it. Yeah. Well, and it's I know,
for me, it's always tricky to decide whether to revisit
something that previous hosts did in a shorter treatment, because
like the list of things to talk about is so
(08:12):
incredibly long that sometimes it's like should we should we not?
Is there enough information beyond what they already said, Like
there's a whole thought process involved, Oh for sure. And
I went back and re listened to that one, and
I found myself several times this is kind of my
litmus test. I've had myself several times going yeah, yeah,
(08:32):
but you left out the part where sure, which is
probably if there are enough of those Like they mentioned
that they tried to use fire breaks and that it
didn't go well. They didn't really discuss why that was
a problem, or like, you know, the fact that there
was a pivotal figure in the fire department that that
was out of commission and did not live much longer.
(08:52):
So those two me are kind of like the fascinating
parts of it, Like when you understand why something went
so poorly, it's a to me a little bit of
a richer experience. So that's why I kind of wanted
to delve into this because it's all of that, and
as well as the the third segment of of that
episode where we talk about Chinatown's population and how poorly
they were treated, but ultimately, with astonishing just tenaciousness, they
(09:19):
were able to reclaim their space in the city and
make it very clear that they lived there and it
was their home and they belonged as much as anyone,
which was It's a weird story because in some ways
it feels very uplifting, but like the it's not as
though they were suddenly not treated in ways that are
racist and gross. So it's a mixed bag, but also
just an important thing to think about and talk about
(09:42):
because unfortunately most history is like that, Like it's not
I always say history isn't clean, which is there's no
Even the good stories usually have something where you're like,
I wish that were not the way it is. Yeah. Well,
and and frequently when we have talked about some kind
of disaster that that displaced minority group, that has not
(10:04):
been how it worked out. It has been that and
then everyone was relocated to a different place, and that
lucrative land was taken up by white people. Like that's
more often how the story has gone on the show. Yeah,
this one definitely is an outlier, which is part of
what makes it so fascinating to me. And again, like
I was a brilliant about my love of Chinatown during
(10:25):
the episode, but I will say it again, I love
Chinatown is one of my favorite parts of San Francisco,
although I love the whole city. Um, I also love
japan Town a whole bunch. I love basically wander anywhere
in that city and I'm usually pretty happy. Well, and
I'll say for yet another time because I also said
it in the show that that that episode from Invisible
(10:45):
about the decisions that they made to try to preserve
their neighborhood. Uh, and that like the effects that those
decisions had both on Chinatown and San Francisco and other places, uh,
super interesting to me. Yeah, there's uh also a thing
I wanted to mention. It's in the show notes for
the episode, but uh, several years ago, there was an
(11:06):
artist who did a series of photographs that are juxtapositional
photographs where one half approximately of the image is from
this period of devastation when buildings were collapsing or they
were on fire, and they kind of blend into scenes
that are modern. So you will see someone happily walking
(11:28):
down the street with their dog or whatever, and you
see that that's the exact place where just a complete
devastation of the area had happened at one point. There's
one of those pictures that's very hard for me to
to look at because I'm a woss and it's there
are several horses that were hit by falling debris and
dine and that's a little bit difficult. So if that's
(11:48):
a problem for any of our listeners, maybe don't look
at those pictures. But they are really beautifully done. Uh
And it's it's just one of those sobering things where
I think it's easy for us to disconnect from the
history of our spaces and not think about what has
gone before in the places where we walk and buy
groceries and do everyday seemingly mundane things. But those are
(12:09):
places where really important stories have played out, whether there
is evidence of them there before us or not. Uh So,
to me, that's kind of what I what I really
love about those pictures, and I encourage anybody to go
take a peek at them. Cool. So that probably wraps
it up for this week, I would say so yes.
If people want to write to us, they can do
that at History podcast at house works dot com. You
(12:31):
can subscribe on the I heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
anywhere else you get your podcasts, and you can always
visit us online at missed in History dot com. Stuff
You Missed in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radios How stuff Works. For more podcasts. For my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(12:54):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production
of I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hello, and welcome
to the podcast. I'm Honey Fry, I'm Tracy Wilson, and
this is our second installment of our little shorties that
we do where we talk about what has been published
(00:22):
on the show. This week kind of a little bit
more of a relaxed, behind the scenes discussion of the topic.
So we're talking about Francis Benjamin Johnston, known more colloquially
as Fanny, and her astonishing photography career. It is astonishing.
One of the things that that came up in the
episode that I thought was maybe worth exploration, but we
(00:46):
are working purely off speculation is the fact that she
was clearly in terms of behavior, very feminist and very
much about moving women forward in terms of having careers.
And she wrote really deep tailed like a how to
essentially of how to start a photography career. She did
not identify as a suffragist or as any part of
(01:07):
the women's rights movement as it was happening in the
late Victorian and early Edwardian eras did you have any
speculation into why that might be? This is all guesswork
and I. My only thought is that because she was
working in Washington, d c. And was working with a
lot of prominent politicians, and was from a family that
(01:28):
was very connected to a lot of politicians. Her father,
for example, we talked about in the episode works for
the Treasury Department. My only thought is that she was
willing to do like the work on the ground, but
she didn't want to make a big statement or stance
and potentially ruffle feathers or mess up any of those
connections which were so vital to her career and really
(01:49):
her family's well being. That's my only guess. But I
love her so much because herself portraits are some of
my favorite photographs I have ever seen in my life.
They are so fun because it really is like, on
the one hand, there's such a wide spectrum of them,
which we described some of them on the show, that
it almost feels like a kid playing dress up, like
(02:09):
it is so many different images of herself as almost
entirely different people. But it also is one of those
things that reminds you that people are myriad, and none
of us is anyone given identity, right right, So, Holly,
you did the research and the writing for this episode,
and the way our process normally works is that Holly
(02:31):
sends me the script and I get the artwork to
go with it on our website. That's sort of one
of our division of labor things on a show. And
so I had only read like the introduction, and I
started a quick search for a photograph to go with it,
because a lot of times it's kind of a big
nebulous thing of is there going to be a picture
for this or not? And the answer is there are
(02:52):
thousands of pictures. They're all over there's a lot of
them that are digitized and available on the web. But
then I replied back to you, having just read that
introduction with the link, saying is this the self portrait
you're talking about in this intro? And you were like yes.
And then, of course I, once I had read through
the whole thing, you described the actual photo and I
was like, well, if I had just hung on for
(03:13):
a minute, I would have known the answer to this question.
No worries at all. Uh. Yeah, I really really love
the fact that Fammi is one of those rare and
unique situations where a lot of her most famous work
is at this point more than a hundred and twenty
years old, but it is still readily available to see online.
(03:34):
Anyone can see her work if they have an Internet connection.
The Library of Congress has the vast majority of her work.
There other libraries and museums that also have some of
her work, but like in terms of the scope of
her work and the amount of it that is digitized,
it is better represented online and in terms of accessibility
(03:54):
than any other photographer from her era I can think of,
and certainly even better than many artists in terms of
things being able to be seen. Uh So, if you
are curious, especially because she did make that really interesting
transition from portraits to architecture and gardens, which is to
(04:14):
me a fascinating gear shift to make kind of midway
through a very lucrative career, it's interesting to look at
how her composition shifts. Uh There is one particular photograph
that she took in the State dining room in the
White House that is so beautiful to me in terms
of light and composition that it reminds me of some
of like my favorite Dutch Golden Age painters in terms
(04:36):
of how they how they use light to focus the eye.
It's really really pretty. Um and a lot of her pictures.
We talked about it in the episode. She was trained
as an artist, so her visual eye is really from
that that ideology and with that education behind it, so
she does tend to create images that look similar in
terms of how light is used and how they're framed
(04:59):
to the way a painter. My and I love that
about them. So one of the things that we talked
about in the episode um was the the pictures that
she took of the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute and
sort of the evolution of how those have been curated
and explored in terms of our content, because they were
made sort of as a pr move in a way
(05:19):
that was inherently racist, because it was about looking at
this through a very white lens when they were photos
of black and Native American students. And it really reminded
me of a few years ago when you and I
were in Chicago. I walked over to the Field Museum
and they had this exhibit going on that was about
the work of Malvina Hoffman, who had been commissioned to
(05:41):
travel the world and make these sculptures of the people
she found living in all these places, and the sculptures
are beautiful. She took enormous care to try to capture
the humanity and the worth of everybody that she was sculpting.
But the reason she had been commissioned to do it
was for the inherently racist idea of creating a racial
(06:02):
hierarchy at which white people were at the top and
then curating them that way in the museum. And so
this exhibition that I saw in more recent years was
sort of looking back, like how was the field perpetuating
racism with these sculptures? Like how do we look at
the sculptures? How do we look at what the field
was doing with these sculptures? And it really reminded me
(06:24):
of the process that those photos sort of went through
as people have re examined how to look at them
and how to think about them in their context. Yeah,
that's uh. I mentioned in the episode an article that
really breaks down like the three primary exhibitions of those
and how those ideas shifted. I cannot recommend highly enough
that people go check that out. I will make sure
(06:46):
in the sourceless that that is the top one so
it's easy to find um. So hopefully people will go
and explore and also just take a peek at her
her photos which are very fascinating, and like I said,
I mean, I'm clearly a very visual thinker. I don't
think that's a surprise to anyone who's ever listened to
the show for more than twelve minutes. So for me,
like that's such an incredible connection to be able to
(07:08):
have to history and how it has all played out
and to look at some of these problematic ideologies that
were being executed through art. It's something that's hard to
talk about in some ways because you want to consider
them as art and from the point of view of
an artist who is trying to make something beautiful, but
they have meaning and they have import and they have
(07:30):
the potential to be very damaging. So it's it's worthwhile
to kind of walk into that that discussion with an
open mind and really look at those images and think
about that right up and how it breaks them down. Uh. So,
our second episode this week was about the San Francisco
earthquake and fire of N six, which has kind of
been lurking on my list for a while, but then
(07:50):
because it kept coming up. As I mentioned in that episode,
on a recent trip to San Francisco, it felt like
the universe was telling me to just stop dithering about
and just do it. Yeah. Well, and it's I know,
for me, it's always tricky to decide whether to revisit
something that previous hosts did in a shorter treatment, because
like the list of things to talk about is so
(08:12):
incredibly long that sometimes it's like should we should we not?
Is there enough information beyond what they already said, Like
there's a whole thought process involved, Oh for sure. And
I went back and re listened to that one, and
I found myself several times this is kind of my
litmus test. I've had myself several times going yeah, yeah,
(08:32):
but you left out the part where sure, which is
probably if there are enough of those Like they mentioned
that they tried to use fire breaks and that it
didn't go well. They didn't really discuss why that was
a problem, or like, you know, the fact that there
was a pivotal figure in the fire department that that
was out of commission and did not live much longer.
(08:52):
So those two me are kind of like the fascinating
parts of it, Like when you understand why something went
so poorly, it's a to me a little bit of
a richer experience. So that's why I kind of wanted
to delve into this because it's all of that, and
as well as the the third segment of of that
episode where we talk about Chinatown's population and how poorly
they were treated, but ultimately, with astonishing just tenaciousness, they
(09:19):
were able to reclaim their space in the city and
make it very clear that they lived there and it
was their home and they belonged as much as anyone,
which was It's a weird story because in some ways
it feels very uplifting, but like the it's not as
though they were suddenly not treated in ways that are
racist and gross. So it's a mixed bag, but also
just an important thing to think about and talk about
(09:42):
because unfortunately most history is like that, Like it's not
I always say history isn't clean, which is there's no
Even the good stories usually have something where you're like,
I wish that were not the way it is. Yeah. Well,
and and frequently when we have talked about some kind
of disaster that that displaced minority group, that has not
(10:04):
been how it worked out. It has been that and
then everyone was relocated to a different place, and that
lucrative land was taken up by white people. Like that's
more often how the story has gone on the show. Yeah,
this one definitely is an outlier, which is part of
what makes it so fascinating to me. And again, like
I was a brilliant about my love of Chinatown during
(10:25):
the episode, but I will say it again, I love
Chinatown is one of my favorite parts of San Francisco,
although I love the whole city. Um, I also love
japan Town a whole bunch. I love basically wander anywhere
in that city and I'm usually pretty happy. Well, and
I'll say for yet another time because I also said
it in the show that that that episode from Invisible
(10:45):
about the decisions that they made to try to preserve
their neighborhood. Uh, and that like the effects that those
decisions had both on Chinatown and San Francisco and other places, uh,
super interesting to me. Yeah, there's uh also a thing
I wanted to mention. It's in the show notes for
the episode, but uh, several years ago, there was an
(11:06):
artist who did a series of photographs that are juxtapositional
photographs where one half approximately of the image is from
this period of devastation when buildings were collapsing or they
were on fire, and they kind of blend into scenes
that are modern. So you will see someone happily walking
(11:28):
down the street with their dog or whatever, and you
see that that's the exact place where just a complete
devastation of the area had happened at one point. There's
one of those pictures that's very hard for me to
to look at because I'm a woss and it's there
are several horses that were hit by falling debris and
dine and that's a little bit difficult. So if that's
(11:48):
a problem for any of our listeners, maybe don't look
at those pictures. But they are really beautifully done. Uh
And it's it's just one of those sobering things where
I think it's easy for us to disconnect from the
history of our spaces and not think about what has
gone before in the places where we walk and buy
groceries and do everyday seemingly mundane things. But those are
(12:09):
places where really important stories have played out, whether there
is evidence of them there before us or not. Uh So,
to me, that's kind of what I what I really
love about those pictures, and I encourage anybody to go
take a peek at them. Cool. So that probably wraps
it up for this week, I would say so yes.
If people want to write to us, they can do
that at History podcast at house works dot com. You
(12:31):
can subscribe on the I heart Radio app, at Apple Podcasts,
anywhere else you get your podcasts, and you can always
visit us online at missed in History dot com. Stuff
You Missed in History Class is a production of I
Heart Radios How stuff Works. For more podcasts. For my
heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or
(12:54):
wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
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