The David Johnson Reference Library is a free, publicly accessible collection of photography books housed in the Harvey Milk Photo Center lobby. Open to anyone whenever the Photo Center is open, no membership required to come in and browse the collection. The collection includes monographs, artist books, and publications from major publishers alongside a growing collection of photobooks by Bay Area artists and publishers.
Photo Book Open Call
Each year we expand our Bay Area holdings through an open call, inviting local artists and publishers to submit work for consideration. Selected titles are added to the permanent reference collection, where they’re available to the public alongside the broader library.
What’s in the collection
The library holds monographs, technical and reference books, and back issues of photography periodicals. Prints by David Johnson, donated by The Bancroft Library, hang in the space.
The collection is non-circulating. Books stay in the lobby.
The library was dedicated in June 2021 and named for photographer David Johnson.
Who was David Johnson?
David Johnson (1926 – 2024) was born near Jacksonville, Florida, and raised under segregation. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he read that Ansel Adams was starting a photography program at the California School of Fine Arts (later the San Francisco Art Institute). He wrote to Adams asking for a place in the first class, mentioning that he was Black. Adams wrote back that the class was full and that his race made no difference. When a student dropped out, Johnson took the spot. He arrived in San Francisco in 1946 and stayed at Adams’s home until he found a room in the Fillmore.
He was Adams’s first African American student and part of the program’s “Golden Decade,” studying alongside work by Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, and Dorothea Lange. Following Adams’s advice to photograph what he knew, Johnson spent the next two decades documenting the Fillmore: children on stoops, barbershops, churches, jazz clubs, social halls, and the civil rights marches of the 1960s. His photographs are among the only sustained record of Black life in the neighborhood before redevelopment displaced most of that community.
Johnson’s career extended well past the camera. He helped found the UCSF Black Caucus, led the San Francisco chapter of the National Alliance of Postal Employees, and was a plaintiff in the 1971 case that pushed San Francisco Unified toward desegregation. He later earned a master’s in social work and spent his final working years supporting foster families.
His work sat largely unseen until 1999, when a KQED documentary on the Fillmore brought it back into view. The David Johnson Photograph Archive, roughly 5,000 prints and negatives, is now held at The Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley. The Photo Center hosted a retrospective of his work in 2014.