Collections Winter 2012 Volume 90 | Page 4

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 2 columbiamuseum.org 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.”