Highlight from The Chrysler Museum Photography CollectionMan Ray: Le Souffle, 1931
© Man Ray Trust
When Brooks Johnson left a tiny backwater on the Chesapeake for the big city, he just got in his ‘65 Ford Fairlane and drove. Everything he owned was stuffed inside the old station wagon — most importantly his camera, which had worked so well to help him meet girls. He was 17, a bit of a rough cob to hear him tell it, and not absolutely sure of the route. But he set off for Baltimore and the Maryland Institute College of Art, terribly excited, deeply shy, and all alone.
It’s hard to credit that picture of Johnson now, sitting across from him as we lunch in what I think of as “his” restaurant, on the ground floor of “his” small gem of a museum in Norfolk, Virginia. The soft-spoken curator of photography at The Chrysler, not too many miles but worlds away from his boyhood home, laughs at his former incarnation. That self-deprecating humor may be the key to why Johnson has become so successful: unlike many who know as much as he does about photography and spend thousands of dollars a year acquiring it, Johnson is a modest man.
