Subscribe...As he pored over the mass of texts and thumbnail photos that the eBay search engine had pulled up on that day in 2005, one strangely worded listing caught Schein’s eye. It read, “Old Snapshot Blues Guitar B.B. King???” He clicked on the link, then took in the sepia-toned image that opened on his monitor. Two young black men stared back at Schein from what seemed to be another time. They stood against a plain backdrop wearing snazzy suits, hats, and self-conscious smiles. The man on the left held a guitar stiffly against his lean frame. Neither man looked like B. B. King, but as Schein studied the figure with the guitar, noticing in particular the extraordinary length of his fingers and the way his left eye seemed narrower and out of sync with his right, it occurred to him that he had stumbled across something significant and rare... the more convinced he became that it depicted one of the most mysterious and mythologized blues artists produced by the Delta: the guitarist, singer, and songwriter whom Eric Clapton once anointed “the most important blues musician who ever lived.” That’s not B. B. King, Schein said to himself. Because it’s Robert Johnson.Searching for Robert Johnson reveals not only what may be the third picture of Robert Johnson but a Byzantine struggle over his legacy as well.
And what comes out of the speakers? A music transformed. The sound of a man, first of all: this dark-toned voice would no longer lend credence to the youth of seventeen or eighteen that Don Law, the only person to record him, thought he might be. Now, especially in the dip of his voice at the end of a line, we can hear the follower of Son House, and the precursor of Muddy Waters. Hear him pronounce his name in ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues’... – now he sounds like “Mr Johnson”, a man whose words are not half-swallowed, garbled or strangled, but clearly delivered, beautifully modulated; whose performances are not fleeting, harried or fragmented, but paced with the sense of space and drama that drew an audience in until people wept as they stood in the street around him... (The wordless last lines of ‘Love in Vain’... in this slowed form, are the work of one of the most heartbreaking and delicate of blues singers.) This is a Steady Rolling Man, whose tempos and tonalities are much like those of other Delta bluesmen. Full-speed Johnson always struck me as a disembodied sound – befitting his wraith-like persona, the reticent, drifting youth, barely more than a boy, that Don Law spoke of: the Rimbaud of the blues... Johnson slowed down sounds to me like the person in the recently discovered studio portrait: a big-boned man, self-assured and worldly-wise... It works for me, but listen for yourself.Steady Rollin’ Man
...If you’ve read the story, then you know that in the summer of 2007, John Kitchens, who represents the Johnson estate, submitted Zeke’s photo to Lois Gibson, a forensic artist who works out of the Houston Police Department, and is a graduate of the F.B.I. Academy Forensic Artist Course. Kitchens first heard of Gibson when the media carried reports that she’d determined the identity of the sailor kissing the nurse in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s famous Life-magazine photo of Times Square on the day World War II ended. But Gibson has also been featured in the 2005 and 2008 Editions of The Guinness Book of World Records as “The World’s Most Successful Forensic Artist” At last count, her sketches and facial reconstructions have helped catch more than 1,144 criminals. (Last year, Gibson published a manual called Forensic Art Essentials designed to aid other forensic artists in their work.)
After comparing Schein’s photo to the two known photos of Robert Johnson, Gibson produced a startling analysis. As she wrote in her report to Kitchens: “My only problem with this determination is the lack of certainty about the date of the questioned photo.” But, she continued, if Schein’s photo “was taken about the same time as, or a little earlier than,” the photo-booth self-portrait, “it appears the individual in [Schein’s photo] is Robert Johnson. All the features are consistent if not identical.” She added: “The only differences are due to the different angle of the camera on the face and/or the lighting.”
Since my story and Zeke’s photo were published, there’s been quite a bit of discourse about the image, particularly online, and in the interest of furthering that discussion I asked Gibson and the Johnson Estate, which had commissioned her report, if it would be possible to share the forensic artist’s analysis in a more detailed fashion. They agreed, so here are some excerpts from Gibson’s report and from recent e-mails that she sent me explaining her analysis.Follow Up: A Disputed Robert Johnson Photo Gets the C.S.I. Treatment
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posted by vorfeed at 12:39 PM on October 9, 2008