Welcome to One Fine Show, where the Observer highlights an exhibit that just opened at a museum outside of New York City—a place we know and love that’s already getting a lot of attention.
Photographers have been among the hardest hit by budget cuts at many newspapers, with nearly half losing their jobs between 2000 and 2012 according to a 2013 report. Institutions like the New York Daily News and the Chicago Sun-Times have laid off their photo staffs, as have Rupert Murdoch’s Australian tabloids. The worst impact of this on the wider society will probably be seen in the future historical imaginations of our present time. Although no one thought LIFE as an investment in the scholarship of the future, it is difficult to visualize the past without thinking about the work of their photographers for hire. Even Dorthea Lange, Robert Frank and Diane Arbus supported themselves through media work.
But if portrait photographers are often underrated, “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” a new exhibit at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, seeks to remedy that with a celebration of one who never became a household name, the way these three did. Lange invited Kanaga (1894-1978) to the California Camera Club, and like Lange, his work soon combined photojournalism with a deep understanding of the artistic power represented by new technologies and a curiosity about social oppression in both spheres. Posted by Edward Steichen He is the Medicine of Life (1950), his portrait of a farm worker in Florida, in his 1955 MoMA exhibition “The Family of Man,” and most of this exhibition comes from the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of nearly 500 early prints and 2,500 negatives his.
“It saddens me to see colored men and women being abused by stupid white people,” he wrote in his book in 1927, and this problem is reflected in all his paintings, regardless of the color of the sitter’s skin. Widow Watson (1922-1924) shows a woman with tuberculosis and her 12-year-old son in their basement apartment. Hope clearly left the picture a long time ago, as the woman appears to be missing and her son appears to be decades older than her age. Untitled (New York) (1922-1924) is another striking example of how he captivates humanity, as a woman cradles her child in her arms while others poke around the frame, curious and wary at the same time.
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His nature studies and cityscapes are not so good. Throughout his work, Kanaga seems to be aware that he is capturing a world that was in the process of great change, which emphasized the importance of capturing the quieter, more fragile moments. This can also be seen in his portraits of artists such as Alfred Stieglitz, Milton Avery and Mark Rothko. The best of these is by his friend Langston Hughes. Taken in 1934, it shows the writer lying on a sofa with his fist supporting his noggin. Like many of his subjects, he seems to be asking us long ago if there are any problems that he thinks have been solved.
“Consuelo Kanaga: Hold your breath” is on view at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art until February 9, 2025.
