School Girl, St. Croix, 1963 (Detail), by Consuelo Kanaga. Brooklyn Museum.
If you’re like many of my friends and neighbors in liberal Democratic San Francisco, you may be shaking your head in disbelief and muttering that you don’t understand the results of the election. If that description fits you, you might chill or gaze at the photographs of Consuelo Kanaga which are now in an exhibit titled “Catch the Spirit” at SFMOMA. “See the Work of This Critical Yet Overlooked Figure in the History of Modern Photography,” the museum’s website proclaims.
Kanaga’s indelible photos are also reproduced in a book titled Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer, which offers snippets of her biography which began in Astoria, Oregon in 1894 and ended in Yorktown Heights, New York in 1978. At her death, her entire estate was valued at $1,345, her name largely erased from the annals of photography, though she had been a contemporary and a friend of luminaries such as Imogen Cunningham, Tina Modotti, Alfred Stieglitz, and Dorthea Lang. No major exhibit of Kanaga’s work took place until 15 years after her death when she began to be appreciated as an artist, and not simply as a documentary photographer of archival interest.
With a name like Consuelo Kanaga you might think she was a Latino or a Native American. In fact, she was descended from old European stock. She had as much talent and as much energy as her better known peers and also a unique style with the camera. She took extreme close-ups of the people she photographed, especially the poor and African Americans as though she wanted to enter their lives, merge with them and share their plight, perhaps because she was born to privilege.
Kanaga’s father worked as a lawyer and judge, her mother as a real estate agent, but by the time she was in her early 20s she shifted from the world of her parents and worked as a reporter, feature writer and freelance photographer with exceptional darkroom skills for The San Francisco Chronicle, the paper owned by newspaper baron, William Randolph Hearst.
In the 1920s she moved back and forth restlessly from California to New York and then back to California, searching for a place where she might put down roots, and find a man with whom she might feel sympatico. Married three times she survived a canceled engagement. Her restlessness took her across America and to Europe and to North Africa.
In the late 1930s she joined the Photo League, a cooperative of New York photographers that was placed on a Justice Department blacklist. She worked for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) and sold pictures to the lefty publications of the day including the New Masses, the Labor Defender and the Sunday Worker, the paper of the US Communist Party, which she joined and embraced some of its causes. In one photo, which might be described as socialist realism, she depicted three heroic workers: one Black, one white and another Asian, all of whom gaze into the distance. The caption might read “Unite and Fight.”
Her best known photo, which isn’t overtly political, is titled “She is a Tree of Life to Them.” It depicts a poor Black woman who holds her children close to her own body. It was included in the 1955 exhibit Family of Man. Kanaga photographed white immigrants from Russia and white workers but she was drawn to Black men and Black women, to black bodies and black faces, and to Black writers such as Langston Hughes whom she befriended.
Near the end of her life she said, “I wasn’t in a group, nor did I belong to anything ever. I wasn’t a belonger.” Her biography and her work suggests otherwise; indeed for decades she meant her work to convey messages to the masses. Art for art’s sake was never part of her credo.
Kanaga noted of the famed photographer, Edward Weston, “His whole life was built around his work. I was much more interested in living.” She did live, and lived to the fullest, whether she was in California, New York or North Africa, and yet it seems fair to say that her life was inseparable from her work and her work inseparable from her life. Intensely political throughout her life, but not ideological, she joined the Sixties civil rights movement and was arrested in Albany, Georgia.
A decade or so before her death, her photos of protesters were included in a book titled Prison Notes by Barbara Deming, a feminist and a non-violent activist who traveled to Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Kanaga remained true to her ideals until the end of her life, though in some of her late work she seemed to turned away from realism to symbolism and photographed sunflowers and old wagon wheels, one of which she titled “The End of an Era.” Perhaps she recognized that she had survived the era that had informed her best work which honors the beauty and the dignity of Black Americans.
Had she been Black she might have enjoyed more fame and prestige than she did. Like the novelist and short story writer, Tillie Olsen, and like Sanora Babb, who wrote about Dust Bowl refugees in her novel, Whose Names are Unknown, Kanaga’s work was eclipsed by male photographers until women teachers and critics like Sally Stein came along and recognized her originality and her artistic compassion. In the wake of Trump’s victory at the polls, we might remember Kanaga’s resilience and endurance all through the crisis of 20th century capitalism. She’s a role model for our own spirited times.
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