Photo exhibition is quite a find

The photo is one of 40 revelatory images in ``Recovered Views: African American Portraits 1912-1925," at the Grimshaw-Gudewicz Art Gallery at Bristol Community College. The images were probably shot by John Johnson , an African-American son of a former slave and Civil War veteran. They came to light in 1999, when a Lincoln family took its collection of glass-plate negatives to the Nebraska State Historical Society. They bore no mark of authorship, but a local woman identified them as Johnson's handiwork -- she had posed for him as a child -- and the exhibit attributes the work to him.

Many African-Americans opened photography businesses in the first decades of the 20th century. Their pictures challenged pervasive stereotypical images of the day, but we don't often see them. Johnson's photos were taken in a city in which racial segregation was being written into law and the Ku Klux Klan was on the rise.

He had a keen eye for composition and tonality and a talent for putting his subjects at ease. Johnson worked with a boxy view camera; he hid under a black curtain capturing an upside-down image on a plate covered with emulsion. But many of his portraits look as if he's right there, making eye contact with his subjects. One brilliant image shows a young mother seated on a porch with her toddler. The boy looks right out at us with a delighted grin.

Some portraits are playful, like one of Ethel and Charles Smith and Anna Hill at Salt Creek (oral-history interviews have provided clues to who many of Johnson's subjects are). Johnson framed the shot carefully, with a dam in the background, horizontal pylons, and a fallen tree crossing diagonally behind the three sitters. Charles Smith sits back against one pylon, his hat at a jaunty angle. Ethel's expression seems to say, ``You know how Charles can be." Hill sits above the couple, regarding them.