Thirty years ago in the attic of an old estate in Massachusetts, John Hanson Mitchell discovered over two thousand antique glass plate negatives. He was told that the photographs had been taken by nineteenth–century ornithologist and conservationist William Brewster, but as a result of a tip from a Harvard research assistant, he began to suspect that the images were actually the work of Brewster's African American assistant, Robert A. Gilbert.
So begins the author's journey. From the maze–like archives at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to the Virginia countryside and haunts of American expats in 1920s Paris, as well as the rich cultural world of blacks in nineteenth–century Boston, Mitchell brings sharp focus to the figure of Mr. Gilbert, a quiet, unassuming Renaissance man who succeeded as best as he could beneath the iron ceiling of American racism. Told with Mitchell's trademark grace and style, the fascinating story of this "invisible man" deepens our understanding of the African American past as well as the history of American photography.
In the mid 1970s, John Hanson Mitchell discovered over two thousand antique glass plate negatives in the attic of an old estate in Massachusetts. At the time, he believed the photographs to be the work of William Brewster, the nineteenth century ornithologist and conservationist. But, as a result of a tip from a Harvard research assistant, Mitchell came to believe that the plates were the work of Brewster's assistant, a little-known African American named Robert Gilbert. In his quest to uncover the story of Gilbert, Mitchell's trail leads from the labyrinthine archives of Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology to the countryside of Virginia; from the haunts of American expatriates in Paris to the culturally rich world of African Americans in Boston at the turn of the last century. Gilbert remained as illusive as the pale image on the original glass negatives that he created more than a hundred years ago, but with careful deconstruction, Mitchell was able to make visible this invisible man. The investigation of the haunting photographs of landscapes and people slowly brings Gilbert into focus as a quiet, unassuming Renaissance man who forged on in the face of social pressures and the iron ceiling of American racism.
