professional photographer, bookseller and journalist, came to Melbourne from England in 1855. Before emigrating he had worked as a bookseller and journalist in Boston, Lincolnshire, then was employed in 1854 on the Harrogate Advertiser (Harrogate, Yorkshire) and on the Boston Guardian where, according to his employer, he proved himself 'a young man of high respectability and moral worth’. He worked as assistant reporter and sub-editor on the Warrington Independent for a short time, and at some stage had been employed by J. Noble, a bookseller and the mayor of Boston. In Melbourne Johnson was initially employed by David Blair, editor of the Age , then worked for the Collins Street bookseller George Robertson, where he was responsible for the accounts.
In April 1856 Johnson applied for the position of chief librarian at the Melbourne Public Library, his application being accompanied by testimonials from Blair and Robertson as to his 'gentlemanly manners’ and 'irreproachable character’. Augustus Tulk was appointed to the position instead, but this did not conclude Johnson’s association with the library. Two prints of his photograph, Interior of the Queen’s Hall Reading Room, Melbourne Public Library, 1858 (LT), made in England in 1900 from one of his old glass plates, are copiously annotated with Johnson’s recollections of the circumstances in which they were taken shortly before the room was opened on 24 May 1859: 'Mr Augustus Tulk (who had been appointed Chief Librarian) sits at the end of the table, the others being his assistants and some workmen then employed on the building. The exposure was six minutes !’. An engraving after the photograph appeared in the Illustrated London News of 28 April 1860.
It is thought that Johnson set up as a dealer in photographic equipment in 1858. By 1860 he was certainly operating a photographic import agency for Hill Norris’s dry plates and A. Keen’s collodion and issuing regular broadsheet price lists of his products (no. 7 for 1860 and no. 9 for 1862 survive). His last known photographs are also his earliest: the reprints produced in 1900 from his 1858-60 Melbourne glass plates. Others taken at the same time were Grand Intercolonial Cricket Match, Melbourne, 1860 and Queen Street, Showing Hobson’s Bay Railway and Suburbs of Emerald Hill, 1859 . Johnson showed a number of his photographs in the 1860 Victorian Exhibition of Fine Arts at Melbourne, 'views of Ballarat and Buninyong’ and Private Residence, St. Kilda , as well as Interior of the Public Library and the cricket match. He returned to England in 1863 after amalgamating his business with that of his nephew Charles Johnson . There he changed his name from Johnson to Johnstone by deed poll.
