Folksingers I (Big Bill Broonzy)

Photographer, teacher, and activist Sid Grossman was one of the founders of the Photo League, a left–leaning association in New York that offered programs, courses, and exhibitions of documentary photography. In his work Grossman recorded the streets of New York and the crush of bodies on Coney Island, rural communities in the Dust Bowl, and festivals in Central America. He maintained a decades–long interest in folk singers, whom he photographed in concert or in his apartment in the late 1940s, often for the organization People’s Songs—for whom Big Bill Broonzy, an accomplished Chicago blues musician, performed regularly. This portrait of Broonzy seems to show the musician mournfully in midsong; tightly cropped, it demonstrates his voice as his central instrument.