Consuelo Kanaga - Photography

Photography

Consuelo Kanaga has been called "one of America's most transcendent yet, surprisingly, least-known photographers." She had a wide range of visual interests, from pictorialism to photojournalistic to portraiture to cityscape to still lifes. It's been said that the dominant theme in her work is an "abiding interest in, and engagement with, the American scene." She celebrated the human in every photo she took, whether it was images of sharecroppers and their homes in the South or found still lifes of flowers and curtains. She was also noted as a technician of the highest skills in the darkroom.

Her portraiture included many well-known artists and writers of the 1930s and '40s, including Milton Avery, Morris Kantor, Wharton Esherick, Mark Rothko and W. Eugene Smith.

Kanaga, who was white, was one of the few photographers in the 1930s to produce artistic portraits of black people. Significantly, the four prints she contributed to the first Group f/64 exhibition were all portraits of blacks, including two of Eluard Luchell McDaniel, whom she would photograph repeatedly in ensuing years. Kanaga also photographed black writers and intellectuals, among them Langston Hughes and Countee Cullen.

In 1949 she was included in the very important show 50 Photographs by 50 Photographers: Landmarks in Photographic History at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Kanaga's best-known image, "She Is a Tree of Life to Them," was given its title by Edward Steichen when he selected it 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.

She continued photographing through the 1960s, including a series of photographs of civil rights demonstrations in Albany, Georgia in 1963. In 1976 the Brooklyn Museum gave her a one-woman retrospective exhibition.

About her work, she 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. Simple things like a little picture in the window or the corner of the studio or an old stove in the kitchen have always been fascinating to me. They are very much alive, these flowers and grasses with the dew on them. 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. A simple supper, being with someone you love, seeing a deer come around to eat or drink at the barn - I like things like that. If I could make one true, quiet photograph, I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.