Richard S. Roberts (1880-1936), a talented photographer, left an enduring film record of Columbia's African-American middle class community during the 1920s and 1930s. This self portrait was taken in his Gem studio in Fernandina, Florida, shortly before he came to Columbia in 1920. He worked during the morning as a custodian at the U.S. Post Office, but for 15 years maintained a photographic studio on Washington Street until his death in 1936. Of the more than ten thousand photographs he made, some three thousand of his glass plate negatives have survived.
Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Samuel Roberts.
