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Carnegie Survey of Architecture of the South
(Library of Congress)
Overview
The Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South — a special collection of the Library of Congress — is a systematic record of early buildings and gardens in the American South. Through a partnership with ARTstor, the Library will be digitizing the Carnegie Survey negatives for eventual distribution through the Digital Library. These documentary photographs were executed by Frances Benjamin Johnston (1864-1952), one of the first American women to become a prominent photographer. The Carnegie Survey is one of several collections related to Johnston housed in the Prints and Photographs Division of the Library of Congress. Through copyright deposits, gifts of the photographer, and purchases from her estate, the Library amassed the Frances Benjamin Johnston collection, which includes 20,000 photographic prints and 3,700 negatives. Johnston herself deposited 6,800 8 x 10” black and white negatives from the Carnegie Survey (covering eight states, without Mississippi), before the Library purchased them from her estate in 1953. These 6800 negatives will be digitized and made available through ARTstor for scholarly and educational uses. While a previously published microfiche, Carnegie Survey of the Architecture of the South, 1927–1943 (Alexandria, VA: Chadwyck-Healey, 1985), reproduced Johnston's photographs, these digital images will make the Carnegie Survey more broadly available for scholarship and teaching.
Around 1890, Frances Benjamin Johnston opened a professional studio in Washington, D.C., embarking on a career as a portrait photographer and freelance photojournalist. In the 1910s, she began to focus on garden and architectural photography. Johnston was one of the first contributors to the Pictorial Archives of Early American Architecture , another collection within the Prints and Photographs Division. Between 1933–-1940, with a grant from the Carnegie Corporation, Johnston photographed buildings and gardens throughout nine Southern states, mainly in Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, and Louisiana, and to a lesser extent in Florida and Mississippi. The Carnegie Survey was an attempt to document the rapidly disappearing Antebellum architecture of the American South. In addition to photographing great mansions, Johnston was one of the first photographers to record the vernacular architecture of the region, whether churches, graveyards, row houses, offices, warehouses, mills, shops, farms, taverns, or inns. Johnston's work also captured interiors, furnishings, and architectural details, as well as neglected and endangered buildings. As a result of this photographic campaign, Johnston published two books, The Early Architecture of North Carolina (1941) and The Early Architecture of Georgia (1957), and was recognized with an honorary membership to the American Institute of Architects in 1945.
Founded in 1800, Library of Congress is the nation's oldest federal cultural institution and serves as the research arm of the United States Congress. It is the largest library in the world, with more than 134 million items on approximately 530 miles of bookshelves. Within the Prints and Photographs Division alone, there are more than 13.7 million visual images, including photographs, prints, drawings, and posters.
Collection information
| Total size of collection* | 6,800 |
|---|---|
| Percentage of completion | 0% |
* Image totals should be regarded as an approximation until a given collection is 100% complete. Users should also bear in mind that the number of images available to them may vary from country to country, reflecting ARTstor’s approach to addressing an international copyright landscape that itself varies from country to country.
Last updated: October 30, 2007