One Fine Show: ‘Consuelo Kanaga, Catch the Spirit’ at SFMOMA
Welcome to One Fine Show, where Observer highlights a recently opened exhibition at a museum outside New York City—a place we know and love that already receives plenty of attention.
Photographers have been among the hardest hit by the budget cuts at most newspapers, with nearly half losing their jobs between 2000 and 2012 according to this 2013 report. Institutions like the New York Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times have done away with their photo staff, as have Rupert Murdoch’s Australian tabloids. The most deleterious effect of these on the broader public will most likely be seen in future historical conceptions of our current moment. Though nobody thought of LIFE magazine as an investment in future scholarship, it’s hard to picture the past without thinking of the work of their jobbing photographers. Even Dorthea Lange, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus supported themselves with media work.
But if documentary photojournalists have always been a little undervalued, “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” a new show at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, seeks to remedy that somewhat with a celebration of one who never became a household name, the way those three did. Lange invited Kanaga (1894-1978) to the California Camera Club, and like Lange, her work soon merged photojournalism with a deep understanding of the artistic potential represented by the new technology and a particular curiosity about society’s downtrodden on both coasts. Edward Steichen included She is a Tree of Life (1950), her image of an agricultural worker in Florida, in his 1955 blockbuster MoMA exhibition “The Family of Man,” and most of this show comes from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of nearly 500 vintage prints and 2,500 negatives by her.
“I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by stupid white people,” she wrote in a letter in 1927, and this pathos is evident in all her portraiture, regardless of the color of the sitter’s skin. The Widow Watson (1922-1924) shows a tubercular woman with her 12-year-old son in their basement apartment. Hope clearly left the picture long ago, as the woman seems lost and her son appears decades older than his age. Untitled (New York) (1922-1924) is another stellar example of the way she captures humanity, as a woman clutches her child to her while others poke into the frame, curious and wary at the same time.
SEE ALSO: FLAG Art Foundation’s Glenn Fuhrman On Partnering With the Parrish Art Museum
Her nature studies and cityscapes are no less elegant. Across all her work, Kanaga seems to have been conscious that she was capturing a world that was in the process of dramatic change, which underlined the importance of capturing the quiet moments, the most fragile ones. This could be seen too in her portraits of artists like Alfred Stieglitz, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. The best of these is of her friend Langston Hughes. Taken in 1934, it shows the writer sprawled on a couch supporting his noggin with a fist. Like so many of her subjects, he seems to be asking us from the past if any of the problems he’s considering have been addressed yet.
“Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art through February 9, 2025.