Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952) took these mystical mirror-world photographs throughout the American South during the Great Depression. The interiors she tended to favor as subject were already old when she first discovered them 80 years ago. Many thousands of Frances Benjamin Johnston's glass-plate photographic images are preserved at the
Library of Congress.
The much younger photographer
Walker Evans (1903-1975) was also in the South during the Depression, also on a mission to create documentary photographs. No two artists working in the same medium in the same place at the same time could, I think, share less in common. His work is remembered and revered. Hers is for the most part already forgotten.
