Robert James Campbell grew up wealthy and died homeless and mostly alone; only two people attended his funeral. Jessica Ferber was 23 years old, newly graduated from the University of Vermont and hanging around Burlington, working days in a photo lab and nights as a cocktail waitress. The homeless-services agency that served Mr. Campbell wanted someone to look through the boxes of photographs he left behind. What did she have to lose?

Thirteen years, it turned out.

The boxes she took home that day in 2002 held clues to a life at odds with his final circumstances: intimate photographs of jazz, folk and blues musicians from New York in the 1960s; candid shots of Myrlie Evers, the widow of the civil rights leader Medgar Evers; the bohemian scene beginning to take shape in Washington Square Park.

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The photographs took Ms. Ferber deeper into Mr. Campbell’s life, but they revealed little about the man who took them. The mystery gnawed at her. Who was he and how did he end up the way he did? Down the rabbit hole she went.

Late last year, she emerged with “Rebirth of the Cool: Discovering the Art of Robert James Campbell,” a book that introduced Mr. Campbell’s photography and described her obsessive quest to trace his life.

“Isn’t it crazy?” she said recently from Portland, Ore., where, at 36, she is starting a home staging company.

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None of the musicians in the photographs remembered Mr. Campbell. Family leads went nowhere. When she advertised his estate in The Burlington Free Press, no one answered. She quit one of her jobs to have more time to work with his photographs. Years passed, and more dead ends. She began to feel she would never get to the bottom of the story. If she gave up, he would disappear completely, his one connection with the world severed. “And I would have failed Bob,” she said.

In the end, she found a few people who knew him, and she was able to bring the bare outline of his life to the page. The book’s publication has allowed her to feel “a little more removed emotionally — in a good way,” she said. “There was a bit of a burden, and it was really sad.”

Still, obsessions die hard. Maybe the next call will be the one that cracks the mystery. “Someone has to remember him,” Ms. Ferber said. “You can see from the photographs, he was everywhere.”

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