Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit

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Consuelo Kanaga was “way ahead of her time,” recalled her photographer friend Dorothea Lange in the 1960s. The comment is recounted by curator Drew Sawyer in his essay for the catalogue for “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” currently on view at the Brooklyn Museum through August 3.

For six decades, Kanaga photographed everything from still life and celebrity portraits to urgent social issues tackling urban poverty, labor rights, racial terror, and inequality. The title of the exhibition comes from a quote by the artist that sums up her work and how she related to her subjects: “When you make a photograph, it is very much a picture of your own self. That is the important thing. Most people try to be striking to catch the eye. I think the thing is not to catch the eye but the spirit.”

The exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. It was curated by Drew Sawyer, the Sondra Gilman curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who was formerly the Phillip and Edith Leonian curator of photography at Brooklyn Museum. The Brooklyn Museum presentation is organized by Pauline Vermare, the current Phillip and Edith Leonian curator of photography, with Imani Williford, curatorial assistant of photography, fashion, and material culture at Brooklyn Museum.

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“Her work is about love and kindness and looking and caring for each other. I mean, essentially, she cared for the people she took photographs of,” Vermare told me during a Zoom call. “Whether they were strangers on the streets of the Bowery, people who have no money, who are down and out, who are misfits, essentially. People who have a life that doesn’t seem to be respected and valued by others … I mean, inequalities, racism, all of those questions of segregation. But it’s the way she was looking. I think that’s why this show feels so important to me.”

Born in Astoria, Oregon in 1894, Kanaga began her career as a writer and photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915 at the age of 21. In doing so, she became one of the first women to work as a staff photojournalist at a major newspaper. She moved to New York City in 1922 and worked for the New York American newspaper, where she stayed for two years before returning to California.

In 1927 and 1928 Kanaga spent almost a year traveling through France, Germany, Hungary, Italy, and Tunisia. Her trip was underwritten with the support of Albert M. Bender, a San Francisco arts patron. During these travels she learned about modernist photographic practices and was able to visit museums, monuments, and churches throughout the countries she visited.

It was also during this time that she began to express her views on racism at home in the United States, which she would explore in her work in the 1930s. In a letter to Bender she wrote “I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by stupid white people.”

In California, Kanaga also met Tina Modotti, an Italian photographer, actress, and activist who organized an exhibition of her photographs. In the 1930s, she became associated with Group f/64, which included such photographers as Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham, and Edward Weston, and was included in a major exhibition of their work in 1932 at the de Young Museum.

When she returned to New York in 1935, Kanaga began making photographs for leftist publications like the Sunday Worker. She joined the Photo League, where she lectured and taught and became the leader of documentary group projects. During the 1940s and 1950s she continued her commitment to photographing African Americans and worked to document workers in the Jim Crow South. Her work was also included in the historic exhibition The Family of Man at the Museum of Modern Art.

Kanaga’s photographs used a modernist visual language to explore social and economic inequities and was committed to using photography to address difficult social issues from labor rights to discrimination. This placed her work in a unique place when compared to many of her peers, being considered very progressive for its time. Her focus on representing people who had been either misrepresented, or ignored by the mainstream media and other artists at the time, further set her apart. But her work continues to resonate today as it reflects many of the same issues that America faces currently.

“I feel like in the work of Kanaga, the photos that I love the most, that move me the most, might be the ones where I can see what she was trying to do with her photographs, showing another image of Black America,” Vermare said. “That was really her mission.”

Over time, her work and legacy have been overlooked and forgotten. While her name itself is not easy to place, and is sort of mysterious, another major factor was the way she lived. “When you look at her work, you think it’s on par with Dorothea Lange and so many other great photographers of her time, and you wonder why the name is not more well known,” Vermare explained. “She did not have kids. She had three husbands … Nobody really was there to support her legacy.”

This exhibition, the first of her work in 30 years, and the accompanying catalogue work to bring Kanaga’s work not just back to light, but to place her back into the canon of great documentary photographers. With the current political climate in the United States, the exhibition is also very timely.

“At the end of the show, there’s a quote by her, and she says, ‘I thought that photography could change the world.’ And there’s that feeling,” Vermare said. “I think that today, to remind yourself, all of us, and especially the younger generation, that it is possible, not to change the world, but that you have to be with your world. You have to be a witness, and you have to hope and always look after each other. So if you’re more privileged in one way or another, if you’re in a position that is more comfortable than another, then it’s your duty to push and to support those who are not as privileged as you. That’s how she lived her life, and I think it’s remarkable.”

Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit is on view at the Brooklyn Museum of Art through August 3. For more info, visit www.brooklynmuseum.org.