Boy and Lincoln

Author
Nina Zurier

Decade

1940s 1950s 1960s

Tags

Activism Community Music 
Photography
Racial Justice

David Johnson was a student in Ansel Adams’s first photography class at SFAI in 1946, along with Ruth-Marion Baruch, Pirkle Jones, Oliver Gagliani, Ira Latour, Rose Mandel, Minor White, and others. He had read about the new photography department, and sent him a letter. “I said, ‘Dear Mr. Adams: I’m interested in studying photography. . . . By the way, I’m a Negro,’” Johnson recalled. Most schools in the U.S. at that time were segregated. In the late 1950s Mike Henderson also felt compelled to state his race when applying to SFAI, because most art schools were still segregated. Adams responded that the class was full but he would put him on the wait list; Adams later sent a telegram offering Johnson a place in the program. On his arrival in San Francisco, Johnson was also offered lodging at Adams’s house. Johnson, like other students, was advised to “photograph what you know.” This led him to explore San Francisco’s Fillmore District. The Fillmore had been a Japanese community, but following the attack on Pearl Harbor and the subsequent internment in concentration camps of all west coast Japanese Americans, the neighborhood was repopulated by Black people coming from the South to work in the naval shipyards. (Johnson’s instructor Dorothea Lange was hired to document the internment camps.) Many of Johnson’s photographs document the new neighborhood, including the Primalon Ballroom, where jazz and blues greats came to play.

After graduating, Johnson went on to establish his own studio on Fillmore Street, where he continued to photograph the development of the neighborhood. In the late 1950s the Fillmore attracted other SFAI artists including Wally Hedrick, Jay DeFeo, and Joan Brown, and was the site of The Six Gallery. In the early 1970s Hilton Braithwaite, another SFAI photography student, would document the so-called redevelopment of the neighborhood—which forced out most of the Black families and businesses.

Johnson also photographed many of the demonstrations and protests of the 1960s, including the historic March on Washington where Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech. The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley holds the archive of Johnson’s photographs.

 NZ 

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