Consuelo Delesseps Kanaga was an American photographer. She worked as a reporter, feature writer, photographer for The San Francisco Chronicle and as a photographer for The New York American.
Background
Consuelo Delesseps Kanaga was born on May 25, 1984, in Astoria, Oregon, United States. Her father, Amos Ream Kanaga, was a lawyer and, for a time, the district attorney of Astoria, but gave up his practice intermittently to pursue a lifelong interest in agrarian affairs and publish several magazines on farming. Her mother, Mathilda ("Tillie") Carolina Hartwig, compiled and wrote a history of Napa Valley, California, published in 1901 and still in use. She had three siblings, two of whom survived.
Education
Consuelo Kanaga had no formal education beyond high school but apparently was encouraged to be a journalist by her father.
Career
After the family moved to San Francisco sometime in the early 1900s, Consuelo Kanaga landed a job as a reporter and feature writer on the San Francisco Chronicle in 1915. Increasingly, her interest turned to photography and she stayed on in this rare career for a woman in that era, until 1919. Kanaga's first job was to write an article; a photographer was sent along to take pictures. Consuelo Kanaga would, in her own words, "sort of arranging the pictures." Her editor, delighted with the results, urged her to try her hand in the darkroom. Soon she was taking a camera on her assignments and spending the rest of her time printing, developing, and enlarging her own photographs as well as those of the rest of the staff photographers.
At first, her work was simple, everything sharp and etched with no nuances. She worked with a large view camera, which, according to Consuelo Kanaga, developed discipline because the photographer was forced to organize the subject carefully, using the whole frame. Early on, she mastered the use of a small amount of flash powder and continued to use it throughout her career for more dramatic effects, finding the results "preferable, softer and more pleasing compared with contemporary flash effects." Consuelo Kanaga always mixed her own developer. Her assignments included everything from social events to covering farmworkers' strikes. Consuelo Kanaga refused job offers from the conservative William Randolph Hearst publication the San Francisco Examiner and worked only for the San Francisco Chronicle and then for a short time moved to the San Francisco Daily News.
In 1918, Consuelo Kanaga joined the California Camera Club. While there she discovered Alfred Stieglitz's publication Camera Work. Through it, she first became aware of the early work of such photographers as Paul Strand, Julia Margaret Cameron, Clarence White, Gertrude Käsebier, and, of course, Stieglitz.
In 1919 Consuelo Kanaga began to lose interest in journalism and longed to try her hand at "pictorial photography." In 1922, she departed for New York City, a journey that took her many months to complete as she free-lanced her way across the United States as a journeyman photographer by car, rail, and boat, finally arriving in New York City in September. In order to support herself, she went to work for a William Randolph Hearst publication, the New York American. Her work brought her to the attention of Stieglitz, who became so impressed with her images of poor people that he offered her the use of his developer formulas. Kanaga's contact with poverty and with African Americans inspired the two main themes that appear in many of her finest pictures. Although she was also very interested in still life, nature, abstraction, and architecture, her personal concern was always with the human condition.
At the urging of the California philanthropist and art collector Albert Bender, she spent a year (1927) in Europe and several months in Kairouan, Tunisia. While there, Consuelo Kanaga took more than one hundred negatives, hoping to publish a book. After returning to New York City in 1928, she accepted a job in the studio of the noted photographer Nickolas Muray, where she learned to refine her skills at developing, printing, and retouching, thus making it possible to open her own studio.
In December 1930, Consuelo Kanaga returned to San Francisco, where she established her own studio and renewed her relationship with West Coast photographers. She was invited to participate in the landmark Group f. 64 exhibitions of California photographers who had rebelled against pictorialism in favor of sharply focused "super-realism." Despite the fact that Kanaga's four contributions to the exhibition were singled out for their excellence, she refused to join the f. 64 movements and kept her status as an independent artist throughout her career. During the Great Depression, she joined the Film and Photo League and did some assignments for the Works Progress Administration (WPA).
Her most productive work was done in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when she visited Maitland, Florida, and Tennessee. Her work was also beginning to appear in exhibitions. In 1955 two of Kanaga's photographs were part of Edward Steichen's landmark exhibition The Family of Man, presented at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Later Consuelo Kanaga moved to rural Yorktown Heights, New York, a much less inspiring atmosphere for her work as a photographer. In 1974 she had a one-person exhibition at the Blue Moon and the Lerner-Heller Gallery, jointly, in New York City, and, by 1976, a small but important exhibition at The Brooklyn Museum. In 1977 her work was shown at the Wave Hill Center for Environmental Studies, the Bronx, New York, followed by participation in the now historic re-creation of the original f. 64 exhibitions at the University of Missouri, St. Louis, in 1978.
Consuelo Kanaga died at her home in Yorktown Heights, still virtually unknown except by her peers and a few fiercely loyal friends. Her death was attributed to emphysema caused by incessant smoking and the harsh and dangerous chemicals she chose to use to produce her prints. Only a few of those exceptional prints are known to have entered the art market. Her productivity was comparatively limited, but that was a choice she made.
In 1982, her husband Wallace Putnam gave Kanaga's 2, 500 negatives and the 373 prints she owned to The Brooklyn Museum. At her death, her entire estate was valued at only $1, 345. Her talent was finally acknowledged in 1993 when her first major retrospective was presented at The Brooklyn Museum.
Achievements
Consuelo Kanaga was one of the most distinguished women photographers of her time. She became well known for her photographs of African-American people. In her lifetime, her works appeared in sixteen exhibitions, six of which were devoted exclusively to her work. Her best-known image was "She Is a Tree of Life to Them", which was the reflection of her study of migrant workers in Florida.
Consuelo Kanaga was an advocate for the rights of African-Americans and other people of color.
Quotations:
"The great alchemy is your attitude, who you are, what you are. 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."
Membership
California Camera Club
,
California
1918
Film and Photo League
Personality
Consuelo Kanaga never formally associated herself with anyone movement, either politically or socially. She was always fiercely independent in thought and action.
Interests
Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz
Connections
In 1919 Consuelo Kanaga married a young mining engineer, Evans Davidson. She had great difficulty reconciling her marriage and her career as a news photographer. Her love of city life began to separate her from her husband's interests, which resulted in an informal separation. While traveling to Tunisia in January 1928 she met and married her second husband, a charismatic Irishman, and writer, James Barry McCarthy. Her second marriage ended badly and they were divorced around 1935.
In 1936, while on assignment for the WPA project the Index of American Design, Consuelo Kanaga met and married on May 28 her third and last husband, the artist Wallace Bradstreet Putnam, who worked for the Sun newspaper. She was forty-two years old, five years older than Putnam. He was supportive of Kanaga's career and shared her radical views.
