Lifestyle
Photographer David Johnson, who chronicled San Francisco's Black culture, dies at 97
“Boy and Lincoln, 1963” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
hide caption
toggle caption
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Boy and Lincoln, 1963” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
David Johnson generally wasn’t interested in people posing for his camera.
As the photographer and civil rights activist put it in a 2017 interview at the University of California, Berkeley: “A big smiling photograph? That wasn’t my style.”
Johnson died at his home in Greenbrae, north of San Francisco, earlier this month. According to his stepdaughter, he was suffering from advanced dementia and had pneumonia. He was 97 years old.
Johnson was the first Black student of the famous nature photographer Ansel Adams and became known as one of the foremost chroniclers of San Francisco’s Black urban culture.
In one of his most famous images, shot early in his career in 1946, Johnson depicts a street corner in San Francisco’s Fillmore District — once a hub for the city’s thriving Black community until redevelopment later in the century forced nearly all of them out.
“Looking South on Fillmore, 1946,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
hide caption
toggle caption
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Looking South on Fillmore, 1946,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
The image has energetic angles and stark contrasts of light and shadow. And it’s shot from above. In the UC Berkeley interview, Johnson said he clambered up four stories on a nearby construction scaffold to get it.
“I focused my camera and took one photograph,” Johnson said. “I was kind of anxious to get this little job over with and go back down to the ground.”
A tough childhood
Johnson was born in 1926 in Jacksonville, Fla., to an impoverished single mother who handed her baby off to be raised by a cousin.
In a 2013 interview with San Francisco member station KQED, Johnson said he got his first camera by selling magazine subscriptions door-to-door.
“I just started snapping pictures around the neighborhood. And I got kind of fascinated with that,” he said.
David Johnson in 2023 with one of his photographs, “Clarence,” at an award luncheon at UC Berkeley honoring the photographer.
Peg Skorpinski
hide caption
toggle caption
Peg Skorpinski
David Johnson in 2023 with one of his photographs, “Clarence,” at an award luncheon at UC Berkeley honoring the photographer.
Peg Skorpinski
Johnson was drafted into the U.S. Navy right out of high school. He was stationed in San Francisco, falling in love with the city, and was then sent to the Philippines for the remainder of World War II. After returning, he wanted to develop his photography skills in college.
It was 1946, and budding photographers were clamoring to get into the program that master lensman Adams had just launched at the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco. Its star-studded faculty included Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, Edward Weston and Dorothea Lange.
San Francisco-bound
Johnson wanted in. So he sent Adams a letter.
“I wrote to Ansel and said, ‘I’m interested in studying photography. I have the GI Bill. And I would like for you to evaluate my [application].’ Ansel wrote me back and said, ‘There are no vacancies in the class,’ ” he told KQED.
But a student dropped out, making room for Johnson.
He hopped on a segregated train that took him from Jacksonville to San Francisco. After living in Adams’ house for a while, he eventually found a low-rent room in the city’s Fillmore District and started taking lots of photos.
“Eartha Kitt with Neighborhood Children, 1947,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
hide caption
toggle caption
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Eartha Kitt with Neighborhood Children, 1947,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
Many of these images appeared decades later in a KQED documentary about the Fillmore’s status — and eventual demise — as one of the country’s most vibrant Black neighborhoods.
“He would go to the clubs in the evenings, take incredible photographs of musicians,” said Christine Hult-Lewis, the pictorial curator of special collections at UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library, which houses the David Johnson archive. “He had very easy relationships with people in the barbershops and the folks in the churches and folks on the streets.”
Johnson said his college instructors encouraged these pursuits.
“Growing up, most of the photographs I have seen of Black people were just not very complimentary,” he told KQED. “I said, ‘My photographs will have Black people photographed in a dignified manner.’ “
Documenting street life, famous figures and civil rights
Hult-Lewis said that as a freelance press photographer, Johnson took candid photos of Black celebrities who came to town, such as Nat King Cole, Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes.
“Nat King Cole at Fairmont Hotel, 1949,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
hide caption
toggle caption
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Nat King Cole at Fairmont Hotel, 1949,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
And he used his camera to spark conversations about civil rights.
“There’s one really iconic photograph of a woman listening to a speech and she’s got kind of a dubious look on her face, but in her glasses are reflected the American flag,” Hult-Lewis said. “There’s another incredible photograph of a young African American boy sitting, holding an American flag in the embrace of a sculpture of Abraham Lincoln.”
Johnson also often participated in direct political action. He attended the 1963 March on Washington, and organized the first Black caucus at the University of California, San Francisco.
“Reflections in Glasses, 1963,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
hide caption
toggle caption
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“Reflections in Glasses, 1963,” by David Johnson.
The David Johnson Photograph Archive, The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley
“He was part of a group that successfully sued the San Francisco Unified School District to compel them to more fully desegregate the schools,” Hult-Lewis said.
Johnson never became a big name like his teacher Adams. By the 1980s he’d stopped taking photos altogether.
But interest in Johnson’s work has grown in recent years, as cities across the country grapple with the negative impacts that urban redevelopment can have. His work is in the collection of major institutions including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and was the subject of a solo exhibition at San Francisco City Hall in 2022.
“The photographs tell life, life as it was then, life that cannot be duplicated or recreated in today,” Johnson’s wife, Jacqueline Sue, told KQED in 2013. “It’s a marker of history.”
A gold-colored item embossed with the word “President” sits on the Resolute desk in the Oval Office of the White House on Nov. 10, 2025.
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
hide caption
toggle caption
Jacquelyn Martin/AP
The New York Times journalist Jonathan Swan has spent the past 11 years covering President Trump through three political campaigns, his first, and now second, term in office and the ongoing war with Iran. Swan says aside from the COVID-19 pandemic, he can’t remember a time where Trump looked “as stuck as he looks right now.”
“It’s pretty clear he realizes that this war [with Iran] has not gone well, has not played out the way that Netanyahu pitched him or that Trump himself thought [it] would play out,” Swan says. “Trump is someone who is naturally given to hubris, but I think we saw a very extreme version of that with this war.”
Swan and his co-author Maggie Haberman spoke with more than 1,000 sources for their new book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The book paints a picture of an unrestrained president remaking the American government and its international relations in profound ways.
Swan notes that the president, who sat for an interview for the book, has been particularly fixated on becoming a “great man of history” during his second term. During one interview, Trump showed Swan and Haberman a document that compared him to notorious historical figures like Mao, Stalin, Hitler, Attila the Hun and Genghis Khan.
“[The list had] nothing to do with morality, all just about pure power projection. And Trump was relishing being in their company,” Swan says. “Maggie and I talked about it afterwards, and it really occurred to us that when you look at it through that lens, his second term makes a lot more sense.”
Swan says the president’s fixation on power is reflected in his decisions to go to war in Iran and implement regime change in Venezuela. But he also sees it manifested in Trump’s White House decor, which leans on what Swan calls the president’s “inner Louis XIV” style.
“He’s gilded almost every corner of the Oval Office,” Sway says. “The history of the Oval Office in the White House has been of modesty when it comes to design and decoration, reflecting the fact that America is a republic, not a monarchy. Trump has no use for that history.”
In a post on Truth Social, Trump referred to Regime Change as “mostly made up, Fake News, largely fiction, as have been most of the things [Haberman] has written about me for so many years.”
Interview highlights
On how Trump’s second term differs from his first
This term is unrecognizable from term one. And I still think a lot of people view [this] administration and government through the lens of the first term. It just couldn’t be more different. One of the ways in which it’s different is the team around him.
I remember in term one covering Trump, and you would have so many conversations with senior officials, including senior national security officials, and the overwhelming impression that you would receive from talking to these people was, A, they thought they were working for someone who was dangerous. And they saw their own roles as protecting the country and the world from the person that they were ostensibly working for. Those types of people don’t exist anymore in this administration. …
At a senior level, it’s really a group of people who believe in him, are loyal to him, in some cases went through the campaign with him. Many of them were radicalized on the campaign through the investigations and the efforts to prosecute Donald Trump. Many of them received some subpoenas themselves and viewed the stakes of the 2024 election as not so much about policy, but about staying out of prison.
So that’s the mindset of Trump and his inner circle. And it’s created a situation where there’s very little friction between a Donald Trump idea that might’ve just leapt straight from his internal monologue out of his mouth, with no filter, to an effort to make it actual American policy and execution.
On Trump’s meeting style
Meetings have no beginning, middle or end. There’s almost no delineation. And what often ends up happening is it’s essentially one meeting that just rolls throughout the afternoon with different people joining and leaving. And Trump [is] engaged or not engaged, people who have no business being in the meeting sometimes joining, whether it’s a pro wrestler, or a crypto investor, or foreign somebody from a golf monarchy, or a CEO. …
The New York Times journalists Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan are the authors of Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Doug Mills/The New York Times
hide caption
toggle caption
Doug Mills/The New York Times
The conversations are non-linear. Trump will get fascinated about one thing that has nothing to do with the topic and that can derail a meeting. We have a scene in the book where he’s having a conversation, a very small meeting, which is highly classified about a defense program, and this guy comes in, just walks into the Oval, salt of the earth, kind of country looking guy, and he’s holding stone samples for the Rose Garden … and the two go off and sort of start conferring, looking out the window, talking about the paving and the stone and this and that, gets on the phone with another contractor. And before time’s up, the meeting’s ended, they haven’t actually resolved the issue they were going to resolve.
On the higher level of secrecy in Trump’s second term
When there are issues that Trump really cares about, or his team wants to keep secret, they can be incredibly secretive, to the point of great frustration across the government. And when it comes to the weightiest issues like the planning of going to war with Iran, we found that very, very senior people in the government were, A, completely cut out of the loop and, B, had no idea about what was being discussed in the Oval Office.
On Trump’s focus on decorating the White House
I traveled with President Trump to the Middle East, palace after palace. And it was really instructive to watch him with these Middle Eastern rulers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Emirates. He was just in a state of absolute pleasure, going from one palace to the next, admiring the marble, looking at most rarefied displays of state wealth on Earth. And that’s essentially what he’s trying to create at the White House. … He’s building this grand ballroom. He seemed to almost be competing with Melania as to who had had the better bedroom. They have separate bedrooms and he was taking objects that she had placed in the center hall of the residence and putting them in his bedroom.
YouTube
On the challenge of interviewing Trump
An interview with Trump requires an enormous amount of preparation if you want to hope to come out of it with any level of success. He’s a really difficult interview… He’s an overwhelming presence and you are confronted with a sort of tidal wave of words. Many of the words and the sentences are detached from reality or completely false. And you have to make judgments in real time about what you let go. You can’t fact-check everything. You just can’t. You can pick your moments.
I see my role in every interview as the representative of the people in that chair. You’re the one who’s lucky enough to be sitting in that chair interviewing the president of the United States. What would regular people want to know and want me to do in that situation? And I think that when you’re interviewing a president of the United States, you want to find the balance between letting them explain themselves and not cutting in every two seconds, but finding moments that are really important to puncture the bubble. Trump creates an unreality bubble. It’s the way he operates. … Tucker Carlson actually described it publicly as like being under a spell and I certainly wouldn’t ascribe a supernatural dimension to it, but I know what he’s getting at.
Thea Chaloner and Susan Nyakundi produced and edited this interview for broadcast. Bridget Bentz, Molly Seavy-Nesper and Meghan Sullivan adapted it for the web.
The real spectrum of housing insecurity
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
hide caption
toggle caption
Annika McFarlane/Getty Images/Getty Images
Who counts as homeless in America?
If you ask the Department of Housing and Urban Development, around 750,000 people are homeless in America. If you ask the Department of Education, that number shoots up into the millions. What does this discrepancy tell us? And how do our cultural ideas about homelessness shape who we see as homeless, and who gets help? To find out, Brittany talks with Dr. Margot Kushel, Director at the UCSF Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative, and Dr. Molly Richard, assistant professor in the Department of Public Health at the University of Rhode Island’s College of Health Sciences.
Want more deep dives on cultural taboos? Check out these episodes:
The truth about men on the ‘down low’
Why can’t we be normal about polyamory?
Support Public Media. Join NPR Plus.
Follow Brittany on Instagram: @bmluse
For handpicked podcast recommendations every week, subscribe to NPR’s Pod Club newsletter at npr.org/podclub.
This episode was produced by Corey Antonio Rose. It was edited by Neena Pathak. We had engineering support from Josephine Nyounai. Our Supervising Producer is Cher Vincent. Our Executive Producer is Barton Girdwood. Our VP of Programming is Yolanda Sangweni.
Lifestyle
They just completed all of L.A. Times’ 101 Best California Experiences — and we’ve got questions!
By December of 2023, Paul Preston realized that his girlfriend Susan Huckle was a big fan of road trips and lists. So for Christmas, he gave her L.A. Times’ ”101 Best California Experiences” zine, a traveler’s bucket list highlighting my top destinations throughout my four decades of traveling the state.
The gift, I’m delighted to hear, was a hit.
Preston and Huckle went through it and checked off locations they’d seen already. Then they hit the road.
And now, after two and a half years of roaming the state between work assignments, they’re back to report that they’ve covered all 101 locations on that list. Though the two have also traveled beyond state lines, the quest to cover California “totally informed our lives for the last two or three years,” said Huckle, who sent me a note of thanks after ticking the last box.
After the note arrived, I was eager to call them and learn more. I caught the couple, of course, in the middle of a day trip.
Susan Huckle and Paul Preston set out to visit every spot on the L.A. Times’ 2023 list of “101 Best California Experiences.” Along the way, they got married in Yosemite Valley.
(Nick Wuthrich)
“We’re out exploring,” Preston said. “So you’re getting what we’re about.”
They’re also now married. That happened last July in Yosemite Valley, which, yes, was on the list.
Huckle, 41, an actress, a host on “L.A. This Week” on Channel 35, a Universal Studios performer and an author, grew up in Santa Maria on California’s Central Coast.
Preston, 56, is also an actor. He leads movie location tours and hosts podcasts, movie trivia nights and special events. He grew up and went to college on the East Coast, so he had fewer California miles under his belt when the couple met in 2020.
Their California 101 travels began in early 2024 with a trip to Paso Robles, where they saw the green slopes along Highway 46, Morro Rock and the elephant seals at Piedras Blancas near Hearst Castle.
“And then,” Preston said, “we just kept going.”
Some of their most satisfying stops, the two agreed, were places they hadn’t heard of, such as Orange Works in the Central Valley town of Strathmore and Angel Island State Park, sometimes known as the Ellis Island of the West. Huckle called Angel Island “a marriage of natural beauty with great, powerful, historic information.”
By early this year, there were only a few destinations left to check.
In April, they did the Indian Canyons and Sunnylands estate near Palm Springs, the Integratron near Joshua Tree and the Cheech Marin Center for Chicano Art & Culture in Riverside. In June, they rafted the South Fork of the American River, along with stops in Old Sacramento and, last of all, Columbia State Historic Park. Then they made their own favorites lists.
Susan Huckle’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley
Badwater Basin
Mammoth Mountain
Angel Island State Park
Cheech Marin Center
Joshua Tree National Park
American River South Fork
The Marshall Store on Tomales Bay
Santa Cruz Island
Sunnylands
Paul Preston’s top 10:
Yosemite Valley
Hollywood Bowl
Griffith Observatory
Catalina
Mammoth Mountain
American River South Fork
Erick Schats’ Bakery in Bishop
Huntington Library and Gardens
Palm Springs Aerial Tramway
Balboa Park, San Diego
Now that they’ve seen so much of the state, I had questions. For one, which spots not on the list would they have included?
Alcatraz, they agreed. Also, as an admirer of redwoods, Preston liked Calaveras Big Trees State Park. As an avid cyclist, Huckle liked the 22-mile Marvin Braude Bike Trail from Torrance to Pacific Palisades.
And was anything on the list a disappointment?
“The Carmel Mission,” Huckle said quickly. “It’s beautiful and the missions are an important part of California history.” But she said the mission’s account of its own history seemed “whitewashed,” saying little about the Native loss and trauma that historians are increasingly recognizing in accounts of the missions.
Said Huckle: “I was like, ‘C’mon guys, nobody really thinks this any more, right?’”
Now that they’re done with the Times’ “101 Best California Experiences,” what what will shape their next trips?
They have a list for that. Huckle picked up an L.A. guide, Danny Jensen’s “Secret Los Angeles,” and the couple plans to start where the book does, with the Triforium, a many-colored sculpture that went up outside City Hall in 1975 (and once featured music).
After that? Maybe the Faces of Elysian Valley, a traffic circle sculpture that Huckle said “looks like Easter Island in the middle of Cypress Park.”
That will leave only about 138 more destinations in the book to cover.
If anybody can do it, it’s these two.
-
Sports5 minutes ago2026 AL, NL MVP Odds: Ohtani Favored; Alvarez Holding Off Challengers
-
Technology11 minutes agoTesla helped save a driver. Is your car ready?
-
Business17 minutes agoSpaceX stock erases all its gains and slides below IPO price in intraday trading
-
Entertainment23 minutes agoContributor: Hollywood will stop fueling racism when audiences demand better
-
Politics35 minutes agoTrump seeks prime-time spotlight for election claims, sparking concerns he’ll intervene
-
Science41 minutes agoCalifornia employer health premiums will cost as much as a new car in 2027
-
Sports47 minutes agoHow Spain ‘recaptured the spirit of 2010’ in its run to the World Cup final
-
World59 minutes agoFake Hezbollah video threatening attack on France possibly Russia-tied
