Consuelo Kanaga – Catch the Spirit
Drew Sawyer, Thames & Hudson, £50

[[{"fid":"69931","view_mode":"inlineleft","fields":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Consuelo Kanaga. Fire, New York, 1922. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Consuelo Kanaga. Fire, New York, 1922. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Consuelo Kanaga. Fire, New York, 1922. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","class":"media-element file-inlineleft","data-delta":"1"}}]]FEW will have come across the name Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978), although she was one of the most influential US photographers during the first half of the 20th century. She suffered the same fate as so many women artists: consigned to the museum of amnesia. It is therefore cause for celebration that T&H, together with the Brooklyn Museum and Mapfre have collaborated on this volume dedicated to her work and helping rescue her from oblivion.

The range of Kanaga’s work is quite extraordinary. It ranges from shots of daily life on the streets of New York and San Francisco, scenes of North African life, to iconic portraits of leading US artists, and particularly for its focus on Afro-American life.
 
Kanaga was born in 1894 in Oregon, into a white middle-class family. In 1911 the family moved from Oregon to California, where, in 1915, Kanaga found a job as a reporter, feature writer and part-time photographer on the San Francisco Chronicle, and there discovered Alfred Sieglitz’s seminal journal Camera Work. She also encountered that other great female photographer, Dorothea Lange, and it was Lange who encouraged her to take up photography as a career and introduced her to the growing San Francisco Bay Area community of artistic photographers, notably Anne Brigman, Edward Weston and Louise Dahl. 

In 1922 she moved to New York to work as a photojournalist for the New York American newspaper. There she met Alfred Stieglitz, who to helped transform her vision from photojournalism to a more aesthetic photographic style. 

In 1926 she also met the great communist US-Italian photographer, Tina Modotti, who was visiting San Francisco, and there she assembled a small exhibition of Modotti’s photographs at her studio on Post Street. In 1927, she planned a prolonged tour of Europe, and spent the year travelling and photographing in France, Germany, Hungary and Italy. 

[[{"fid":"69932","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Consuelo Kanaga. Kenneth Spencer, 1933. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"2":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Consuelo Kanaga. Kenneth Spencer, 1933. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Consuelo Kanaga. Kenneth Spencer, 1933. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"2"}}]]In 1928, she returned to New York and initially found work as a photographic retoucher, but within months had her own darkroom and was printing the first of her many photos from Europe. In 1930 she moved back to San Francisco. Her meticulous work in the darkroom and mastering of light and shade resulted in a series of iconic portraits, often extreme close-ups, that are masterpieces of chiaroscuro.

In 1931 she met and began to employ African-American Eluard McDaniels, a young man-of-all-trades, who worked for her as a handyman and chauffeur. Through her relationship with this young Afro-American, she began to photograph him around her home, and became captivated by the plight of African-Americans and their continuing fight against racism in the US. Soon she was devoting much of her photography to images of African-Americans.

In 1935, when she again moved back to New York, she laid plans for a portfolio of African Americans and interviewed several families in Harlem while documenting their lives. 

In 1938, while in New York, she joined the Photo League, where she lectured a new generation of artistic photographers and became the leader of the Documentary Group projects. 

The Photo League was a co-operative of photographers who bonded around a range of common social and creative causes. Founded in 1936, the League included some of the most noted American photographers of the mid-20th century among its members. It ceased operations in 1951 following its inclusion in 1947 on the US Department of Justice blacklist, with accusations that it was a communist, anti-American organisation. 

[[{"fid":"69933","view_mode":"inlineleft","fields":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Consuelo Kanaga. Tennessee, 1950. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"3":{"format":"inlineleft","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":"Consuelo Kanaga. Tennessee, 1950. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"alt":"Consuelo Kanaga. Tennessee, 1950. Credit: © Brooklyn Museum","class":"media-element file-inlineleft","data-delta":"3"}}]]The League’s origins grew out of a project developed by Willi Munzenberg’s Workers International Relief (WIR), based in Berlin. In 1930, the WIR established the Workers Camera League in New York City, which soon came to be known as the Film and Photo League. Its goals were to “struggle against and expose reactionary film; to produce documentary films reflecting the lives and struggles of the American workers; and to spread and popularise the great artistic and revolutionary Soviet productions.”

Kanaga’s photographs were printed in a number of progressive publications of the time, including New Masses, Labor Defender, and the Sunday Worker. She became active in the civil rights movement and took part in and photographed many demonstrations. In 1963, she was arrested in Georgia during the Walk for Peace.

Picture Of A Mother With Two Small Children is as moving as Dorothea Lange’s iconic image of share-croppers during their flight from the dust bowl. A powerful cover photograph for Labor Defender of a pot-bellied white boss figure standing over a black prisoner, or another issue in defence of the framed Scotboro Boys, are examples of her commitment to black liberation.

Kanaga was one of the few photographers in the 1930s to celebrate the beauty and dignity of Afro-Americans. She also photographed black writers and intellectuals, among them Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen and Paul Robeson.

Widely viewed in white circles as ugly and unphotogenic, her work portrayed black people as beautiful, desirable and erotic. Her nude portrait of Robeson relishing its athletic splendour is a celebration of the black male body.

Consuelo Kanaga died virtually unknown in 1978, but her legacy endures. She has been called “one of America’s most transcendent yet, surprisingly, least-known photographers.” She had a wide range of visual interests, from pictorialism, photojournalism and portraiture to cityscape and still lifes. 

Her best-known image, She Is a Tree of Life to Them, was selected for the landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955. The picture, from a study of migrant workers in Florida, portrays a slender black woman, framed against a white wall, who gathers her children to her with a tender gesture.

About her own work, Kanaga said: “I could have done lots more, put in much more work and developed more pictures, but I had also a desire to say what I felt about life ... Stieglitz always said: "What have you got to say?" I think in a few small cases I've said a few things, expressed how I felt, trying to show the horror of poverty or the beauty of black people. I think that in photography what you’ve done is what you’ve had to say. In everything this has been the message of my life.”

It is impossible to pick out one or two images, as many of her images are equally powerful testaments to her keen eye, deep humanity and empathy with her subjects. They can certainly hold their own amongst the more famous photographers of that era.