The biggest hole in this patchwork is the one thing that would establish Johnson’s humanity in a society hooked on visual media: photographs. In the years since he died, only two known photographs of Johnson have ever been seen by the public. The first of those images is believed to have been taken in the early 1930s and has been described as Johnson’s “photo-booth self-portrait.” The size of a postage stamp, it provided the public its first real glimpse of Johnson when it was published, more than a dozen years after it was found, in Rolling Stone magazine in 1986, the year that Johnson was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. In the photo, Johnson, wearing a button-down shirt with thin suspenders and holding a guitar, stares at the lens with eyes that look both defiant and haunted. A cigarette dangles from his lips, and although the guitar is only partially visible, his long left-hand fingers can be seen forming an indeterminate chord on the guitar’s neck.

If the photo-booth shot was a low-budget affair, the second image had production values. Taken by Hooks Bros., a photographic studio located in Memphis, it shows Johnson once again holding his guitar as he sits cross-legged on what appears to be a tapestry-covered stool. But this time, the bluesman is resplendent in a pin-striped suit, a striped tie, shiny dress shoes, and a narrow-brimmed fedora cocked over his right eye. He is smiling in the photo, but his eyes make him look like a deer caught in the headlights.

The Hooks Bros. photo was first widely seen in 1990, when it was featured on the cover of Robert Johnson: The Complete Recordings, the two-CD boxed set issued by Columbia Records that collected what, at the time, was Johnson’s entire surviving canon. The set sold more than a million copies, establishing Johnson as the biggest-selling pre-war blues artist of all time.