Who was J Dudley Johnston? (2)

(And why have I received an award named after him?)

(Continued.)

"Portrait of J Dudley Johnston," 1906, by Alvin Langdon Coburn.

But, as I said, I digress. Who, you might ask (as I did at the outset of this ramble), was J Dudley Johnston, and why did this Royal Photographic Society award I received get named after him?

J(ohn) Dudley Johnston (1868-1955), elected to the Linked Ring Brotherhood in 1907, was a highly respected pictorial photographer working with what we now call alternative processes — gum-bichromate and platinum printing among them. The Linked Ring was the U.K. counterpart to the Photo-Secession founded by Alfred Stieglitz in the States. In her study The Linked Ring: The Secession Movement in Photography in Britain, 1892 – 1910, Margaret Harker identified Johnston as a leading Secessionist, stating that “The more adventurous of the Secessionists explored the visual world afresh, breaking away from what had become established forms of picture making by photography.” Most of Johnston’s photographic work is to be found in the collection of the Royal Photographic Society.

No less notably, Johnston served twice (1923-5, 1929-31) as president of the Royal Photographic Society, the world’s oldest ongoing organization of its kind — founded January 20, 1853. Simultaneously, he took on the role of “honorary curator” of the RPS collection, serving in that capacity from 1924-55. During his tenure, he played a crucial role in initiating and then building the Society’s permanent collection. (“A man of many parts,” as Robert Leggat puts it it, Johnston, “a student of music, at one point . . . became director of the Liverpool Philharmonic Society.”)

J. Dudley Johnston, "Liverpool — An Impression," 1906. Gum bichromate print. Royal Photographic Society, Bath, England.

When Johnston became honorary curator for the RPS in 1924, the collection comprised something like 100 photographs. By 1930, he had acquired for the collection works by Henry Peach Robinson, Frederick Evans, and Julia Margaret Cameron, as well as several private collections, including that of Alvin Langdon Coburn. The RPS collection currently incorporates well over a quarter of a million images: daguerreotypes, calotypes, salted-paper prints, albumen prints, ambrotypes, glass negatives, and examples of experimental colour processes. Additionally, it holds over 6,000 items of photographic equipment, 13,000 books, as many bound periodicals, and much more. This vast collection is now housed at the National Media Museum (formerly the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television), Bradford, England.

This curatorial and archival project overlapped with Johnston’s commitment as editor and frequent contributor to the RPS Photographic Journal. The various demands of his several offices, all of which he took with great seriousness, appear to have pushed Johnston into becoming one of the earliest historians of photography. Impressively, Johnston undertook these projects not as a young man but in his 50s, and fulfilled the obligations involved until his 80s.

Photography in Science, Art and Industry (the Photographic Journal, Special Number, April 1933)

In the late 1940s, toward the end of his RPS career (and near the end of his life), Johnston contended with historian Helmut Gernsheim, who objected to Johnston’s curatorial emphasis on late pictorialist works over the modernist works that Gernsheim favored — and, wearing his photographer hat, that Gernsheim produced himself. (You’ll find Edward Bowman’s account of this dispute in the November 1992 issue of the Photographic Journal.) Clearly a man with strongly held convictions, and a deep commitment to providing a support base for his colleagues in the field — attitudes with which I certainly identify. Pam Roberts described him as “a link between photographers of all countries and all persuasions, a visionary and a man with a passion for research and for dissemination of information.”

To honor his years of dedication to the cause, The Pictorial Group of the RPS published a monograph by Bertram Cox, The Pictorial Photography of J Dudley Johnston, 1905-1940 ( London: The Royal Photographic Society, 1952), with 48 gravure plates. Eventually, he was awarded the OBE for his services to photography. To date, no one has collected Johnston’s writings. That’s a project the RPS might see fit to subsidize.

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I didn’t know much about Johnston beyond his name before the Royal Photographic Society notified me of my receipt of the award named for him, so I made it a point to bone up on him in the interval. On September 7 I flew over to London with my oldest friend, Douglas I. Sheer (we played in the sandbox together, so this relationship goes back close to 65 years). Doug — who co-founded Artists Talk On Art and heads D.I.S. Consulting Corp., which generates high-end research for the broadcast industry — had other business in Europe, so he decided to join me in London before heading to a conference in Amsterdam.

The afternoon of our arrival on the 8th we met up with an old friend of Doug’s, the opera singer Tom Emlyn Williams. They’d served as choirboys together at New York City’s Grace Church in their youth, then had lost touch with each other for half a century.

As a trio we saw a substantial but predictable Eadweard Muybridge retrospective at the Tate Britain, organized by the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC, that had just opened, had a bite to eat in the Tate cafeteria, and then caught one of the last days of “The Family and the Land: Sally Mann,” a retrospective at The Photographers Gallery. Housed in a tall, narrow building, The Photographers Gallery closed for major renovation shortly thereafter, toward a planned reopening in fall 2011.

Perhaps the remodelling will open up the space, which struck me as cramped for large prints like Mann’s. Still, it was good to see works of hers with which I’m familiar — the family studies, and some of the “Deep South” landscapes — along with pieces from those series I hadn’t known previously, plus newer ones: recent intense, oversized close-ups of the faces of her offspring, and scrutinies of decomposing bodies in a Tennessee research facility. Mann’s body of work expands and deepens steadily. I was amused to realize that she’s taken up the same wet-collodion process that Muybridge abandoned as soon as an alternative became available.

(l-r) Tom Emlyn Williams, Douglas I. Sheer, A. D. Coleman, London, 9/8/10.

Doug, Tom, and I next haled ourselves to a pub and hoisted a pint: Tribute Ale from St Austell Brewery in Cornwall. Tom’s emigration happened so long ago that he now speaks with a UK accent, funny to listen to as we recounted tales of our shared youth in the New York City of the 1950s. Reluctantly, we parted company, Tom for home and Doug and I for our hotel on Hackney Road in the Shoreditch section of town.

We got up late the next morning, found a cozy, clean little diner for breakfast, then a Moroccan internet café to catch up on our correspondence. (Unlike the Days Inns in the States, which offer free internet, this one charged exorbitantly for access everywhere, even in the lobby.)

A. D. Coleman outside the Royal Society, London, 9/9/10. Photo by Doug Sheer.

Dressing for the RPS event to come, Doug and I set off via the Underground in the general direction of Covent Garden. Lunch, followed by a stroll in the public gardens outside Buckingham Palace, then a quick sandwich before we hied ourselves to the Royal Society for the awards event. (Click here for my synopsis of this event.) Afterwards, back to the Days Inn.

Doug got up in the middle of the night to head off to his event in the Netherlands. I’d given myself two more days for wandering a bit in London. I don’t do heavy tourism (first Big Ben, then the changing of the guard, etc.); I just like to poke around. So I had another breakfast at the little diner (fried egg, “chips,” meaty bacon, toast, coffee for USD $6 — couldn’t beat it). The Moroccan Internet café was closed for Eid. So I got myself by bus to London Bridge, walking over and back while unable to resist singing (sotto voce) “London Bridge is falling down.”

Then afoot via backstreets to the Tate Modern for Sandra Phillips’s “Exposed: Voyeurism, Surveillance, and the Camera Since 1870,” organized by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art — intriguing premise, but defined too broadly and thus ultimately diffuse. Late lunch/early dinner of a roasted wild boar/venison sausage on baguette, purchased at Borough Market (a blessedly unmodernized open-air souk set beneath the railway viaducts between the river Thames and Borough High Street in South East London). This treat got eaten on a bench in a quiet churchyard by the Thames.

More such the next day: Same breakfast, then once again to the Tate Modern, for a few hours exploring its Surrealism “hub.” I decided I need to spend more time with the work of Roland Penrose, at whom I haven’t ever looked closely. Thence to the Menier Gallery, at 51 Southwark Street, for the show “Mugabe’s Victims: Zimbabwe Today,” grim color photographs of damaged survivors made in 2009 by an anonymous Getty Images photographer, sponsored by the Prisoners of Conscience Appeal Fund. Followed by some aimless strolling around, until my feet started to hurt.

Eventually I headed for the hotel, picked up my laptop, and went to the Moroccan café for a late-afternoon cappuccino and email catch-up. Finally, to the hotel once more, to watch a movie on the hotel cable channel, with a dinner of smoked salmon and salad, and a breakfast of yogurt and croissant, all picked up at the local market, to brace me for my early-morning sojourn via the Underground to Heathrow for my return flight. Altogether, a lovely way to start off the fall season.

I arrived at Newark International on the afternoon of September 12. Three days later, I waited on the other side of those exit doors for my wife Anna and stepson Jacky to join me here.

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(Picture credit: “Portrait of J Dudley Johnston,” 1906, by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1882-1966). Bromide print. Published here courtesy of the Royal Photographic Society Collection at the National Media Museum.