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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
"Reimagined" -- because we'll never know for sure, February 28, 2005
Robert A. Gilbert (1870-1942) was probably the first African-American landscape photographer. Author John Hanson Mitchell sets out to prove this fact after finding thousands of glass plates initially attributed to William Brewster (1851-1919) , the first president of the Massachusetts Audubon Society. For it turns out that Brewster had a "factotum" -- Mr. Gilbert, an employee who accompanied him on photographic excursions throughout New England, and who actually took the photos and developed the images. The search for Mr. Gilbert begins.
Several interlocking histories emerge: Mr. Gilbert's life, William Brewster's life, the origins of the Audubon Society, the aristocratic circles of the Boston Brahmins, and the lifestyles of the Southern blacks who migrated north after the Civil War. Each chapter opens with one of Gilbert's b&w photos, giving us just a taste of his work. What a teaser! We want to see them ALL! Hopefully, MassAudubon will someday hold a showing of more of these wonderful bucolic scenes from the beginning of the last century.
Another underlying story here is the relationship of the researcher with his subject. Mitchell is the kind of investigator who knows that the answers he wants cannot be provided by the Internet or through interlibrary loan. Sometimes you just have GO and ASK. He may be a soft-spoken observer, but he has no qualms about going anywhere, doing anything, and talking to anybody who may be able to provide clues in his quest for the truth. His own re-creations of Mr. Gilbert's life take him from the valleys of western Virginia to the mountains of southern New Hampshire, from the streets of Boston to Paris. He watches, he listens, he analyzes. And he gets lucky in meeting a few folks who either knew Mr. Gilbert or at least knew someone who did.
This book provides a great escape into another life in another time. It's also noteworthy in its focus on an average African-American man who wasn't famous in his day, but did good work and should be given credit for it.
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Stylish, lyrical and moving, September 24, 2006
This remarkable and memorable book recounts a very personal spiritual quest - lasting several decades - to discover, intuit and imagine the life of an African American intellectual (Mr Gilbert) who lived mostly in New England in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
The book's interest is both historical and character-based; since it is partly factual and researched, and partly novelistic and invented.
The writing is beautiful: Mitchell is one of the best prose stylists around.
I have never come across anything quite like this book - it stays in the mind. It seems to have the qualities of a possible cult classic.
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0 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Precious Little When You Add It All Up, November 20, 2005
I liked Hanson Mitchell's book while reading it but afterward, sitting there looking out at my pond with its setting of wild birds, the book still warm in my hands, I felt that I had gone a long way with the author, only to be left with very little new information about the black photographer Robert Gilbert.
There is one stunner when the author is placidly re-reading Scott Fitzgerald's novel TENDER IS THE NIGHT, the story of Dick and Nicole Diver's Antibes summer and Dick's subsequent crackup. Suddenly Hanson Mitchell comes across a sentence about a black man in France who had made a fortune with a shoe polish recipe in Scandinavia, Jules Peterson. Like a flash he knows, deep down, that this passage must be referring to his quarry, the elusive photographer Gilbert. Such an identification is invaluable to Fitzgerald scholars, though I think Hanson Mitchell unfairly attempts to convict Fitzgerald of racism on the basis of his fictionalization of some events in Gilbert's life.
As he admits, Gilbert's daughter was alive when he began his quest to find out the truth about her dad, and yet he did not meet her. Unfortunately that leaves him pretty high on the ground when it comes to solid information. At the end of the day, or maybe I'm wrong, did we ever find out if Gilbert did take the photos attributed to Brewster? This book might have made a nice magazine article, but even so it would have been kind of threadbare. Instead Hanson Mitchell pads out his nothing with lots of charming mini-stories about Black Brahmins, birding, the lost generation, really anything that comes into his head.
The photographs are lovely and we must thank the author for attempting to contextualize them. As for the rest, it's like Grandma said, since the deaths of Henry Green and Samuel Beckett has there ever been a book published with a gerund-based title that was anything but second-rate>
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