Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Consuelo Kanaga was “way ahead of her time”, Dorothea Lange said in the 1960s, recalling the early days of their friendship and shared pursuit of photography. “Generally if you use the word ‘unconventional’ you mean someone who breaks the rules — she had no rules.” Lange’s assessment reflects Kanaga’s status as one of the few women to become a staff photojournalist at a major newspaper in the 1910s, and her association with avant-gardist groups in the United States during the 1930s. Nevertheless, she was not fully able to commit to her art. She got married several times, often putting her career on hold; she moved across the country; and she worked various jobs to support herself. Today, Kanaga’s work remains under-recognised despite her notability during her own lifetime and the path she forged for female photographers.Over six decades, Kanaga, a white woman, documented social issues from urban poverty and labour rights to racial terror and inequality. She also championed the formal and poetic possibilities of photography as an art form. Her output spans photojournalism, modernist still lifes and celebrated portraits of Black Americans, both famous and anonymous.Consuelo Delesseps Kanaga was born on May 15 1894 in Astoria, Oregon, the second child of Amos Ream Kanaga and Mathilda Carolina Hartwig, two independent-minded writers and professionals. In 1915, at the age of 21, she began writing for the San Francisco Chronicle, where she learnt photography while on assignments. She began working as a staff photographer for the newspaper in around 1918, and moved to another San Francisco paper, the Daily News, the following year.In 1922, after separating from her first husband, Kanaga moved east for a fresh start. She was offered a job as a photojournalist at William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper New York American. There she met the young artist Donald Litchfield, an Englishman who worked as a retoucher. They became a couple and, in 1924, moved back to California. While in New York, Kanaga met the photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, who encouraged her to pursue her art. The two became friends and his work had an indelible impact on hers. Kanaga produced photographs in San Francisco and New York during the 1910s and 1920s that demonstrate her belief in the observational value of photography, capturing scenes of daily life.Kanaga’s early photographs can be associated with the style known as “straight photography”, which favoured the unmanipulated image. It was popularised by publications such as Stieglitz’s journal Camera Work. One issue of the journal, in 1917, featured a portfolio of Paul Strand’s pictures of objects, people and urban scenes which Stieglitz praised as “brutally direct. Devoid of all flim-flam; devoid of trickery and of any ‘ism’.”Kanaga began doing portrait photography to supplement her income; she would operate portrait studios intermittently for the next several decades. Portraiture would also become the primary focus of her artistic, non-commercial work. While much of her work in photojournalism is lost, portraiture is well represented among her negatives and surviving prints. Her photographs of elite clientele as well as artists, musicians, photographers and writers evidence how Kanaga experimented with posing, cropping, lighting and printing to enhance an image’s expressive potential.Among the most formative experiences for Kanaga was her trip to Europe and north Africa in 1927-28. She wrote that the experience solidified her interest in portraiture: “Strange but the more I see in portrait work the nearer I feel toward expressing myself. Now I can see how hours passed absorbing the quality of painting and sculpture abroad has given me a longing for more clear and penetrating work. I would sacrifice resemblance any day to get the inner feeling of a person.”Kanaga returned to the US with a new sense of purpose. While she had written about her views on racism in the US during her travels abroad — “I am sick of seeing coloured men and women abused by stupid white people,” reads a letter from 1927 — it was not until she returned to San Francisco that Kanaga began making art that expressed these beliefs, such as “Hands”, from 1930.In Harlem during the 1920s and 1930s, Black intellectuals and artists sought to redefine and celebrate Black American identity, a movement known as the Harlem Renaissance. They called on white artists to participate as well. Kanaga’s response can be seen in many of her portraits. By 1935, Kanaga was back in New York, where she set about creating a portfolio of portraits of people living in Harlem. Unlike other photographers, she did not foreground the poverty of their lives. She almost always produced formal portraits that excluded signifiers such as dilapidated interiors. Instead, the compositional focus is her sitters’ faces and outfits.Kanaga’s capacity to create a portfolio of Black American life became increasingly difficult. In 1936, she met the painter Wallace Putnam, whom she eventually married. In 1940, they purchased a property in upstate New York and, in 1950, moved there full time. Kanaga’s art practice slowed over the next two decades, although she did photograph the natural environment around her home.During the winter of 1949-50, the artists Milton and Sally Avery invited her and Putnam to stay with them at an artists’ colony in Maitland, Florida. There Kanaga made a series of photographs of Black families and farm labourers. One photograph features a statuesque mother with her son and daughter by her side. It would gain iconic status in Edward Steichen’s 1955 blockbuster MoMA exhibition The Family of Man, where it was paired with a phrase from Proverbs 3:18: “She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is everyone that retaineth her.” It has been known as “She is a Tree of Life” ever since.Kanaga passed away in February 1978, aged 83. During the last years of her life, she began receiving more recognition for her contributions to modernist photography. She had several exhibitions, including a survey exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum in 1977. Yet her politics has often been obscured. Confronting racism and the struggles of workers, Kanaga’s unique oeuvre synthesises photojournalism and portraiture in the creation of beautiful yet also political photographs. Drew Sawyer is curator of “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit” at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until February 9, co-produced with the Brooklyn Museum and Fundación MAPFRE, MadridFollow @FTMag to find out about our latest stories first and subscribe to our podcast Life and Art wherever you listen
