It is now clear that Grottkau consistently supported himself as a professional photographer and studio owner while concurrently leading both local and national socialist labor movements. This fact, long overlooked, is not insignificant to the history of both American photography and American political history. […]
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Paul Grottkau brought to his work as a studio photographer an aptitude for managing complex, precise technical processes as required in the practice of the building sciences in which he was educated. His day-to-day organizing activities within the labor movement required a deep devotion to social ethics and a sincerely felt empathy for ordinary folks and their interests. This combination of technical knowledge and social conscience must have served him well as he endeavored to put his customers at ease before his lens. […] Hard facts about the [1886 Haymarket] bombing [in Chicago] still remain clouded and the guilt of most, if not all, of the eight convicted men is still questioned. The innocence of the four executed anarchists has been largely proven retroactively. It is one of the “Haymarket Martyrs,” Albert R. Parsons, executed on November 11, 1887, who connects Paul Grottkau the political activist to Paul Grottkau the professional photographer, via this singular image of a mixed-race woman. […] What we’re offered instead is merely a set of pictures John Szarkowski likes — a comparative bagatelle … Such a misuse of power, prestige and influence is an effective if lamentable indication of why the Modern’s credibility and influence on the medium have waned so dramatically during the last decade of his tenure. […] We can date John Morris’s active involvement in generating the Capa D-Day myth to sometime during the summer or fall of 1954, when, as Executive Editor of Magnum Photos, he wrote the captions for a posthumous Capa portfolio that would appear in the 1955 edition of U.S. Camera Annual. […] |
 SPJ Research Award 2014 |