at portraiture. He advertised that “if you
are beautiful, we guarantee to make your
photographs just like you want them...
If you are not beautiful, we guarantee to
make you beautiful and yet to retain a
true and brilliant likeness of you.” His
portraits of African Americans—whether
taken in the studio or during his travels
across the state—all possess a quiet dignity.
They reflect a socio-economic crosssection of life during the 1920s and 1930s:
children, laborers, domestic servants,
self-made entrepreneurs, families, religious
personages, and educated professionals.
Roberts also took architectural
photographs, documenting homes old
and new, as well as institutions of higher
learning. The only African American
commercial photographer in the city,
Roberts was commissioned to document
important events for schools, social clubs,
churches, and others. Some of these images
found their way into the pages of the
Palmetto Leader, a newspaper serving the
African American community, and whose
offices were conveniently located across the
hall from Roberts’s studio.
Richard Samuel Roberts, Fernandina, Florida, before 1920, CMA 1993.12.1, gelatin silver print, posthumously printed from the
original glass plate negative, Gift of Gerald E. Roberts, Beverly Roberts, Cornelius C. Roberts and Wilhelmina R. Wynn
medium by studying how-to manuals
and taking correspondence courses. His
early photographs bear many of the
distinguishing characteristics of his mature
work: technical precision, meticulous
composition and the ability to establish an
instantaneous rapport with his subject, all
of which enabled him to create an honest
portrayal of the human personality.
Roberts transferred to Columbia, South
Carolina, in the early months of 1920,
together with his wife, Wilhelmina Pearl
Williams Roberts, and their four children
(a fifth would be born shortly after their
move). He paid $3,000 for a five-room
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house on Wayne Street, evidence that
he and his family were members of a
rising middle-class African American
community in the segregated city. In 1922,
he established theRoberts Studio at 1119
Washington Street, just west of Main
Street, in the heart of the city’s “Little
Harlem.” Each day, Roberts labored from
4:00 am until noon as custodian in the
Post Office, after which he walked several
blocks south to his studio to meet clients,
make appointments, and process his
photographs.
Using cameras which could accommodate
5x7 and 8x10 glass plates, Roberts excelled
Roberts was one of only a few African
American photographers active in the
city of Columbia during the 1920s and
1930s and one of only about a half-dozen
active in the South during that time. Were
it not for his reliance on the use of glass
plate negatives at a time when celluloidbased sheet film had grown in popular
usage, Roberts and his photographs might
have been rendered a mere footnote
in the annals of photographic history.
Fortunately, that is not to be the case.
Each in their own way, the photographs
contained within this exhibition perfectly
illustrate the meditation by Eudora Welty
about the power of photography to “part
a curtain, that invisible shadow that falls
between people, the veil of indifference to
each other’s presence, each other’s wonder,
each other’s human plight.”