On the Brooklyn Museum on a latest sunny spring Sunday, I made a joyful discovery: An vital piece of pictures’s historical past has simply been recovered within the type of Consuelo Kanaga. The extremely well-executed exhibition Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit demonstrates that though she is little-known as we speak, Kanaga was a significant photographer of her time. Not solely was she one of many first feminine photojournalists in the US, however she additionally participated in main photographic teams from f/64 to the New York Photograph League. The present makes clear simply how large (and deep) her inventive group was, emphasizing her bonds with figures like Dorothea Lange, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham, Yamazawa Eiko, and Alfred Stieglitz. Her output ranged from socially engaged photojournalism to inventive portraiture to modernist abstraction, with a nod to spirit pictures in there, too. One may write a photographic historical past of the primary half of the Twentieth century via her life story. It’s a staggering resumé.
Regardless of the breadth of her oeuvre, a key Kanaga “style” emerges from the almost 200 works on view. Each {photograph} consists with immense care. Via her digicam lens, she shapes her topics right into a sort of excellent geometry, becoming them collectively ever so neatly, like items in a puzzle. That is notably true of her portraits and architectural images, like “She is a Tree of Life” (1950) and “Clapboard Schoolhouse” (c. 1935). On the identical time, she by no means practices the type of modernist defamiliarization usually related to such formal precision: Her human topics seize you with their intimate gaze, even choke you up, as in Kanaga’s portrait of the widow Annie Mae Merriweather, whose husband was lynched for union organizing. “Camelia in Water” (1927–28) factors to the broader Modernist custom of photographing glass and flowers in vases (see André Kertész), although the accompanying wall textual content quoting Kanaga demonstrates the deep humanity of her trendy imaginative and prescient: “I photographed it because somebody had taken it off the lapel of his coat in my studio and tossed it on the table. It was all deteriorating along the edges. It was so beautiful I couldn’t bear to see it go unheralded.”
Left: Consuelo Kanaga, American, “She is a Tree of Life” (1950), gelatin silver print; proper: Consuelo Kanaga, “Clapboard Schoolhouse” (Nineteen Thirties), gelatin silver print (each pictures courtesy the Brooklyn Museum)
Catch the Spirit does Kanaga justice, too, in its consideration to element. By first introducing the photographer within the context of her group, viewers get a direct sense of who she was as each an artist and an individual. (It’s additionally a pleasant contact that the identical sort of digicam and movie she used is on show, since this facet of pictures is so simply obscured in our dematerialized digital world.) The exhibition design maximizes its influence all the way down to the putting juxtaposition of pink and blue-gray wall paint colours, which makes the room itself really feel like a tightly composed murals. In a considerably uncommon however welcome transfer, a number of differing prints of a single {photograph} grasp subsequent to one another in locations, demonstrating the technical facet of Kanaga’s printing as she experimented with framing and publicity. (Curator Drew Sawyer continues to set a excessive bar for himself for the upcoming 2026 Whitney Biennial, which he’s co-organizing with Marcela Guerrero.) And whereas business, documentary, and “fine art” pictures are sometimes siloed off from each other, Catch the Spirit does no such factor, revealing the deep connections between these modes via the lifetime of an important Twentieth-century photographer that historical past forgot.
Left: Consuelo Kanaga, American, “Annie Mae Merriweather” (1935), gelatin silver print; proper: Consuelo Kanaga, “Camelia in Water” (1927–28), gelatin silver print (each pictures courtesy the Brooklyn Museum)
Set up view of Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit (photograph Julia Curl/Hyperallergic)
Set up view of Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit (photograph by Paula Abreu Pita; courtesy the Brooklyn Museum)
Set up view of Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit (photograph Julia Curl/Hyperallergic)
Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit continues on the Brooklyn Museum (200 Jap Parkway, Brooklyn) via August 3. The exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with Fundación MAPFRE and the San Francisco Museum of Fashionable Artwork. It was curated by Pauline Vermare with Imani Williford.
