Today is the birthday of Ansel Adams. Adams was a legendary American photographer, known for his love of nature, technical innovations in photography, and his dramatic photographs of Western landscapes. He was a pioneer in the movement to preserve the wilderness and one of the first to promote photography as an art form.
He also established the first fine art photography department at what would become the San Francisco Art Institute. That is where the subject of this article, David Johnson, enters the picture.
David Johnson, a native of Jacksonville, Florida was the first African American student of Ansel Adams. In his 1946 classes at the California School of Fine Art, (now the San Francisco Art Institute), Adams advised Johnson and his other students to photograph his own neighborhood and document the faces and places with which he was most familiar.
Johnson combined his professional training as a photographer with his personal love of music to capture. via his camera, the heyday of San Francisco’s Fillmore District, which was known as the Harlem of the West. He photographed it’s clubs, dance halls and way of life.
Another portion of his photography was his documentation of the civil rights movement in San Francisco, the NAACP registration drives, and the March on Washington.
Johnson’s work and artistic vision were framed by his desire to depict people positively, even under adverse conditions.
His most published works are his images of ordinary African Americans, children and adults, going about the mundane routine of daily life. He captured raw emotion; around a dinner table, on the street corner or standing up against discrimination.
Below are excerpts from an interview by Jacqueline Annette Sue, author of A Dream Begun So Long Ago: The Story of David Johnson, Ansel Adams’ First African American Student
“You see, as a youth growing up in Jacksonville, Florida, I found that I was curious about the neighborhood and environment where I lived. We were poor and living on the edge. However, my foster mother provided a good place for me to grow up.”
“After my discharge from the Navy following World War II, I decided to come to San Francisco and study photography with Ansel Adams at the California School of Fine Arts (now the San Francisco Art Institute). While Ansel and other students photographed Yosemite and nature, it was a natural fit for me to photograph people in the Fillmore community I lived in.”
“I was very active in the union and in local politics. I met many in the up-and-coming leadership of the black community when we were going to school and in the churches of the Fillmore neighborhood. I took photographs of Terry Francois, who was appointed by Mayor John Shelley as the first African-American to serve on the Board of Supervisors; Joseph Kennedy, first African-American appointed to the municipal court; Dr. Carlton Goodlett, publisher of the Sun Reporter newspaper and one-day-to-be California assemblyman Willie Brown. I photographed many of the national personalities, such as Thurgood Marshall, before he became a Supreme Court justice, and one of my favorite people, the poet Langston Hughes.”
At 92, David Johnson still shoots straight and strong.
The film may be viewed here.
Photograph Information
David Johnson and his iconic 1946 photograph in the 1300 on Fillmore lounge.
Photograph by Rory Earnshaw