RIDGEWOOD, N.J., Dec. 5 - Almost everyone has seen the famous study in black and white, one of those rare photographs that entered the collective memory as a snapshot not of a moment but of an era and maybe something more. It's now on almost any bus in New York City and many of its suburbs, an invitation not just to remember but to reflect.

At the front of a bus, previously reserved for white riders, is Rosa Parks, face turned to the window to her left, seemingly lost in thought as she rides through Montgomery, Ala. In the seat behind her is a young white man looking to his right, his face hard, almost expressionless. The two, the only figures visible on the bus, seem a few inches and a universe apart, each seemingly looking at and for something utterly different.

Everyone knows her. No one knows him.

Except for Catherine Chriss, his daughter. And, like his identity, hidden in plain sight, unknown even to the veterans of that era still living, what's most telling about the real story of the black woman and the white man is how much of what we think we know is what we read into the picture, not what's there.

The man on the bus, Nicholas C. Chriss, was not some irritated Alabama segregationist preserved for history but a reporter working at the time for United Press International out of Atlanta. He died of an aneurysm at 62 in 1990. Mrs. Parks died at 92 on Oct. 24, a few weeks short of the 50th anniversary of her refusal to give up her seat on the bus to a white man.