Major Series: 2020
Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons
When, several years ago, my friend and colleague Colleen Thornton introduced me to the research she had begun based on a photograph she purchased on eBay, I offered her as much space as she needed at the blog for publication of her results.
The outcome of Thornton’s painstaking inquiry introduces to the medium’s history two extraordinary figures: a German-born 19th-century U.S.-based anarcho-socialist photographer, Paul Grottkau, and his subject, the African-American anarcho-socialist Lucy Parsons, widow of one of the men railroaded to public hanging in the prosecution of the suspects of the Chicago Haymarket Riot. In the cabinet portrait that Thornton discovered the destinies of these two notable left-wing figures intersect, as her essay makes clear.
Unlike the Capa D-Day project here at the blog, which functions as the running journal or diary of an ongoing investigation, Thornton offers a self-contained, persuasive, and compelling analysis, a prime example of what close attention to individual photographs can reveal. This is a first-rate work of scholarship, and a significant addition to the literature. It marks the blog’s first (but perhaps not last) publication of a fully resolved piece of research.
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Robert Capa on D-Day: This series of posts began in June 2014 when the distinguished photojournalist J. Ross Baughman, who had contributed an earlier Guest Post on painters using photographs as source material, emailed to ask if I would consider publishing his analyses of Robert Capa’s D-Day negatives and the legend of their subsequent fate. It turned into an ongoing investigation that resulted in the thorough debunking of this myth.
