David Johnson saved a portrait he took as a teen of his younger brother and a relative while they were growing up in segregated Florida in the 1940s.
Johnson, who was the only person who could read and write in his household, knew nothing about photography then, he recalled in 2017, but something told him that one day he would be a photographer.
His decision would prove to be prescient. Johnson’s interest in the field led him to San Francisco in the 1940s, where he would become the first Black student of Ansel Adams, an accomplished documentarian of the city’s Black community and an activist.
Johnson captured iconic images of the Fillmore district, a thriving community for San Francisco’s Black residents before they were forced out by government “redevelopment” initiatives in the 1960s. He also documented the civil rights movement, including the 1963 March on Washington, and photographed high-profile figures such as WEB Du Bois, Langston Hughes, Thurgood Marshall, Nat King Cole and Eartha Kitt.
“He was quite a man,” Candace Sue, Johnson’s stepdaughter, said in an interview. “There are very few people who in their lifetime can achieve even one of the things he managed to achieve in his 97 years.”
Johnson died last month at age 97, but lived to see a renewed appreciation for his work. In recent years, Johnson’s photos were inducted into the Library of Congress and the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and featured in an exhibit at city hall. The Bancroft is home to Johnson’s archive, which serves as a primary source material of the era.
“[Johnson] is this great story of when a masterpiece finally finds its moment,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, the library’s pictorial curator.
Johnson, born in Jacksonville, Florida, in 1926, was interested in photography from an early age. He got his first camera as a prize for selling magazine subscriptions as a teen, he said in an interview at the Bancroft Library in 2017.
He fell in love with San Francisco when he visited after being drafted into the US navy during the second world war. When his service was over, Johnson knew he wanted to study photography and wrote to Ansel Adams, who was overseeing a program at the California School of Fine Arts.
“[I] wrote a telegram and said ‘Dear Mr Adams, I’m interested in studying photography. And by the way I’m a Negro.”
Most schools in the south didn’t admit Black students, and Johnson didn’t want to travel across the country only to be turned away. “I had to cover my bases,” he said.
When a spot opened up, Adams offered him admission to the program and invited Johnson to stay with him until he could find a place to live. He was met by the acclaimed photographer Minor White, who would become his mentor. White and the other photographers around Adams’ home at the time wanted him to have a better camera and pooled together their old equipment, Jackie Sue Johnson, Johnson’s wife, told the Guardian.
“He was thrown in a group of people that didn’t look like him – they were all white, but they gave David all of their equipment that they weren’t using,” she said. “They taught him a lot. They just took him and really supported him.”
Adams and most of the other photographers were interested in nature, Jackie Sue Johnson recalled, but that was never David’s passion. “He didn’t have a car, and if he had a car he didn’t have gas money, so he couldn’t go to Yosemite and Muir Woods and take this wonderful nature photography.”
White and Adams told him to photograph what he knew. “What David knew is he knew his people,” said Jackie Sue Johnson, who along with her husband authored a book on his life.
Johnson headed to the Fillmore. Sometimes called the Harlem of the West, the Fillmore also had a thriving jazz scene before redevelopment ousted thousands of people. He remained in the neighborhood for years, and went on to work as a photojournalist.
His work centered people – a couple dancing close in a juke joint, men chatting outside a record shop and, in one of his favorite photos, a little boy in a cap sitting on steps.
“The pictures have this real poignancy of a place that just doesn’t exist in the same way any more,” Hult-Lewis said. The influence of Adams and his education can be seen in the quality of Johnson’s prints, she said, and the beautiful composition of his photos.
One of his most famous images is the Fillmore from four stories up. He climbed up the scaffolding of the Bank of America to capture a quick photo of a street corner from above, with street cars and vehicles in motion and pedestrians making their way from one side to another. Earlier in the day, he had taken a moving portrait of a disabled man on a skateboard.
“Athletes will say that when they hit several home runs, it was kind of their day. There are instances in my life and photography where it was just my day,” Johnson said in the 2017 interview. “The images just sprung out of nowhere. It was almost saying – that’s it, go for it.”
Johnson had a gift for capturing a single moment, Jackie Sue Johnson said. In another one of his more well-known photographs, a boy holding a flag sits in the lap of an Abraham Lincoln statue at a civil rights demonstration in San Francisco. “Lincoln, the flag, everything was there. It was almost like the gods set it up for me,” Johnson recalled.
For a time Johnson operated a studio in the Fillmore, but he eventually stopped working as a photographer and turned to other jobs to support his family, Hult-Lewis said. He worked at the University of California, San Francisco, where he co-founded the Black caucus to advocate for the rights of Black workers, Candace Sue said. Johnson and the NAACP sued the San Francisco unified school district to demand school desegregation as required by law.
“My personal saying is David was more than just a photographer,” Jackie Sue Johnson said. “He loved photography. It’s all he could talk about, but he was [also] a civil rights activist. He was always an activist. He was always trying to help or advocate for the underdog.”
Into his 90s, he would visit the San Francisco board of supervisors to advocate for legislation, particularly those supporting people with mental illness, his family said.
He never had exhibitions while he was working as a photographer, but his work has been rediscovered and recognized widely in recent years after it was featured in the 2006 book Harlem of the West.
“When I found his work I went hallelujah because it had a much more expansive description of this neighborhood,” said Lewis Watts, a co-author of the book, photographer and professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
“He was an incredible artist and an incredible person,” said Watts, who said he viewed Johnson as a friend, colleague and mentor. “The humanity in his work is reflected by the person that he was.”
In the years since, his photos have been included in a KQED documentary on the Fillmore District and exhibited at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, as well as city hall. It’s been a slow build, Hult-Lewis said, but Johnson was thrilled to witness it.
Johnson will be remembered for his civic contributions, Candace Sue, Johnson’s stepdaughter, said, and his documentation of the Fillmore.
“We remember and can see the joy and vibrancy of the Fillmore and what it was like before it was destroyed,” she said. “He documented what is no more and I don’t think we would see it the way we see it today without having that lens of the past.”
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Peter Hujar was photographing the hip, intelligentsia, underground, gay and straight crowd. He photographed people who had power in that scene. The actor and writer Charles Ludlam, who was in The Big Easy and Museum of Wax, the theatre artist Lola Pashalinski.
These people were there from the early days of bohemia; they were people who wanted to be beatniks when they were growing up. They weren’t exactly hippies or flower people. He photographed smart people, and I don’t mean smart in the old-fashioned sense of the “smart set”. I mean brainy: brainy bohemians that had a style.
He got good people because everybody thought he knew what he was doing, and that they were going to look good in his pictures, because you always looked good in Peter’s pictures. Even when you were dead, he made you sexy. These are not ugly pictures. Someone like Diane Arbus, who probably influenced Peter, didn’t take ugly pictures either, but she could certainly make people look frightening. Here, if anybody looks frightening, it’s because they look so smart.
Peter made my portrait (top) in 1975, after my movie Female Trouble had just come out. Fran Lebowitz and Lisa Robinson introduced me to him. I think we shot it in his loft in the East Village. He was a very sexual person; I would see him out in the crazy sex clubs in New York. He was handsome and smart and he wasn’t a separatist. He hung around with straight people, women, everything, which I always did too. So I felt completely comfortable with him. I was relaxed. You felt safe. And that’s what you have to feel to get in bed with somebody while they take your picture. He was an inch away from you; he didn’t say a lot. It didn’t last for ever.
He didn’t want anything either; Peter didn’t care about money. He was not a hustler at all, as far as going out and getting jobs went; he was not good at that.
He took what came to him and he was not known as a photographer like he is today. Even after he died, in 1987, you could get his stuff fairly inexpensively at auctions. It took a while for people to realise how original and great he was.
Now, I have one of his photographs of a big garbage can filled with trash hanging in my living room. It’s almost formal. I thought it was the perfect image to have in the house that trash paid for.
Charles Ludlam was around right at the very beginning of the avant-garde theatre scene in New York. He was influenced by the performance artist Jack Smith, and was in turn a big influence on me. I would run away from my home in Baltimore and go and see Smith’s performance pieces and movies. Ludlam was part of that whole crowd when Andy Warhol was around. It was a scene. I see this picture and I just remember how great Charles was. And God, we were all so young.
Burroughs always looked old and dressed old, and Peter caught that here. He looked like a banker even when he was 20. I knew him from the punk scene, where he was reinvented in the 1980s. It was Burroughs who called me “the Pope of Trash”. That’s like God himself anointing me. He invited me over for a visit once and passed me a joint. Who doesn’t smoke pot when it’s William Burroughs offering? Later on, I looked in his bedroom and saw he had a single bed and he had been reading a paperback version of Guyana Massacre, Charles A Krause’s 1979 eyewitness account of the mass suicide in Jonestown. He served me warm vodka in a washed out peanut-butter jar. I was so impressed.
Sontag looks beautiful here. She looks, almost against her will, pretty. And he doesn’t show the grey streak in her hair, which is like taking a picture of me without my moustache.
Peter’s talent was to catch you when you were not playing yourself. And all of these people knew how to play themselves.
This picture of Divine is what he looked like, in real life. He always wore that one piece garbageman’s outfit. I always called Divine “she” when he was in female costume and character and “he” when he wasn’t. This portrait was taken right after the release of my movie Female Trouble, where he played a spoiled schoolgirl who runs away from home and falls pregnant.
The picture is kind of haunting. He looks very pensive, in a way. This is Peter catching him off guard, not being the “Divine” character, but the person I knew. The only other time people saw him, he was this flamboyant, insane psycho that we invented to scare hippies. But in real life, he was kind of a gentleman, and a good host; even quiet.
I look at the dead in Peter’s photographs and think, “That’s quite a crowd, too.” You might need some La Mer cream on these people. I tell you, don’t ever get an open coffin. It’s a really bad idea.
These photographs also remind me of the saddest thing, said by a character in Joy Williams’s short story “Honored Guest”: “The dead just forget you.”
“Peter Hujar: Portraits in Life and Death” is at the Santa Maria della Pietà in Venice from April 20 until November 24
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My iPhone is one of the best cameras I’ve ever owned, but it’s also incredibly boring compared to a Leica M11 – and that feeling has been rammed home by the arrival of Leica’s new Leitz Phone 3, its third and most interesting smartphone so far.
The Leitz Phone 3’s allure has, I admit, been enhanced by its Leica red dot and the fact that it’s also only available in Japan. This has naturally made me want it more, but even from a distance, I can see it’s packed with little touches that make me wish smartphones weren’t all functional, grey rectangles that take technically ‘perfect’ photos.
For a start, there’s its design. The Leitz Phone 3 is probably a rebranded Sharp Aquos R8 Pro (another Japan-only phone), but it’s also the closest thing to a cross between a phone and a Leica M-series camera. Leica’s given the phone a lovely textured finish and, yes, a lens cap. It’s ridiculous, and I’d lose it in ten minutes – but it’s also a lot of fun.
On a more practical level, the Leitz Phone 3 also has a lot of new software touches. You get an exclusive Golden Hour widget, to tell you when to dash out and get that landscape shot. As much as I love Photopills and its iPhone widget, Leica’s one looks particularly classy and it’s great that it’s built-in. The feature I really like the sound of, though, is the lens simulations.
The Leitz Phone 3’s best, and most interesting, new feature is the virtual camera lenses in its Leitz Looks camera mode. These simulate the various aperture stops of three of Leica’s most popular lenses; the Noctilux-M 50mm f/1.2, the Summilux-M 28mm f/1.4, and Summilux-M 35mm f/1.4.
The combined cost of those three lenses is $21,085 / £18,220 / AU$35,070. The Leitz Phone 3 doesn’t have a hope of getting anywhere close to the image quality they can produce – its lenses are likely mostly made from plastic. But I find the concept of software-simulated lenses fascinating, and it’d be great to have the character of Leica-tuned bokeh and vignetting, plus color simulation, in my phone by default.
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It wasn’t long ago that smartphone portrait modes were artifact-ridden nightmares, but according to Leica, the Leitz Phone 3 can simulate the look of those three classic lenses at each aperture stop, from f/1.2 to f/8. Film simulations, like those on Fujifilm cameras, are now pretty common (in this phone they’re called Leica Tones), but software that can simulate the character of specific lenses is something else.
That doesn’t mean the Leitz Phone 3 is a replacement for an M11, but it does make it way more interesting than my iPhone’s Camera app.
As you’d hope from a Leica-branded camera, the camera hardware itself is pretty strong too – on paper.
Like the Leitz Phone 2, which landed in 2022, you get a main camera with a 47.2MP 1-inch sensor that’s combined with a 19mm f/1.9 lens. Hardware-wise, that’s comparable to the iPhone 15‘s 48MP 1/1.28-inch sensor.
You also get a fairly standard front-facing 12.6MP camera with an f/2.3 aperture, which isn’t much to write home about. But like a ‘proper’ camera, you do get a microSD card slot to help boost the 512GB of onboard memory, and there’s also the rare inclusion of a headphone/microphone jack.
This is all backed up by some other interesting software features, too. For the first time on a phone, the Leitz Phone 3 has a feature called ‘Leica Perspective Control’ which comes from its cameras. This is particularly handy for architectural photography and helps you make sure buildings are standing up straight.
While it’s possible to do this in post-production in apps like Lightroom (or by using tilt-shift lenses, if you have them) the benefit of Leica’s software is that it shows you where in the photo it’ll need to crop to correct the vertical lines. It does this by combining gyroscopic measurements and algorithms, making it another handy feature that I don’t have on my iPhone (without third-party apps, at least).
These kinds of touches, combined with the LFU widget which cycles through images from the Leica Fotografie International Gallery, make the Leitz Phone 3 look like a proper photography tool with a distinct character. But this also comes with big downsides.
Just as with the Leica M11, I’m likely romanticizing the Leitz Phone 3 and overlooking the practical annoyances that, outside of photography, probably don’t make it a fun phone to live with.
It runs on Android 14 and it isn’t clear how many years of software updates it’s likely to get. More importantly, it’s only on sale in Japan and seems unlikely to launch outside of that region, given that neither the Leitz Phone 1 or 2 ever got an international release.
I’ve also never really seriously entertained getting a Sony Xperia 1 V (which new leaks suggest will get a Sony Xperia 1 VI successor soon), even though it also offers some very interesting camera features and software touches.
The reality is that the iPhone 16 Pro, which I’ll probably upgrade to this year, will almost certainly be the Canon EOS R5 or Sony A7 IV of the phone world when it comes to smartphone photography. In other words, the solid, sensible choice – but I’m still glad that phones like the Leitz Phone 3 exist and hope to see more of its kind arrive outside of the Japan.
