Frances Benjamin Johnston: The Hampton Album

Comprised of 159 extraordinary platinum plates, Frances Benjamin Johnston's Hampton Album documents life at the Hampton Institute, marking a pivotal moment in this historically black university's history.

Frances Benjamin Johnston (American, 1864-1952), one of the first women in America to work as a professional photographer, was commissioned in 1899 to photograph the Hampton Institute, then a thirty-year-old institution dedicated to the practical and academic education of freed slaves and Native Americans. What became known as the Hampton Album—comprised of 159 platinum plates exhibited in 1900 at the Exposition Universelle in Paris—is Johnston's signature work and has become a touchstone for contemporary historians and artists.

The leather-bound album was discovered serendipitously by Lincoln Kirstein in a Washington, D.C. bookstore during World War II and donated to MoMA in 1965.