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.
Links to and synopses of the installments in this Guest Post series can be found below, in chronological order:
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 1 (5/24/20): In which Thornton introduces us to a cabinet-card portrait of an unidentified African American woman, and to the hitherto unknown photographer who made it.
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 2 (5/27/20): In which Thornton delves deeper into the life of the prominent anarcho-socialist Paul Grottkau and his work as a labor organizer, a newspaper publisher and editor, and a studio photographer in the 1880s.
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 3 (5/31/20): In which Thornton explores further Grottkau’s life and work up until his premature death in Milwaukee in 1898, upon which “Ten thousand people attended [his] funeral.”
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 4 (8/3/20): In which Thornton introduces the subject of this cabinet-card portrait by Grottkau — the African American Lucy Parsons, outspoken anarchist and widow of Albert Parsons, railroaded and executed after Chicago’s 1886 Haymarket Bombing.
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 5 (8/6/20): In which Thornton explores the ethnicity of African American anarchist Lucy Parsons, along with the reasons that she and her martyred husband fabricated an alternative lineage to make her more credible to the public of that era.
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 6 (8/9/20): In which Thornton discusses the long-term professional and political collaboration between Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, concluding with a summary of Parsons’s later life, death, and legacy.
• Guest Post 29: Colleen Thornton on Paul Grottkau and Lucy Parsons, 7 (8/12/20): In which Thornton explores a recently auctioned cabinet-card portrait of Lucy Parsons and the significance of its consequent attribution to a previously unknown photographer.
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All installments of this article are © copyright 2020 by Colleen Thornton. All rights reserved. For permissions and other questions, contact the author via the email address below.
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Trained as a painter/printmaker in NYC art schools, Colleen Thornton over the past four decades has focused on fine-art curation and research, arts advocacy, administration and fundraising, and business development. She co-founded and was executive director of City Without Walls Gallery in Newark, NJ. While living in Europe (UK and Denmark) for two decades she worked in the fine arts and architecture on various projects, including fundraising, gallery exhibitions, and international conferences.
Thornton has built a substantial collection of 19th- and early 20th-century vernacular photography, Japanese ukiyo-e, and Scandinavian works on paper. As a private dealer, she has added to the collections of several major museums.
With former U.S. Ambassador to Denmark Richard N. Swett, FAIA, Thornton researched and co-authored the book Leadership by Design: Creating an Architecture of Trust (2005). Her writings on cultural topics, including photography, have been published in the U.K., Denmark and the U.S. To contact Colleen Thornton, click here.
