In Brooklyn Museum a recent sunny Sunday spring, I made a joyful discovery: an important element in the history of a photograph has just been recovered in the form of Kanaga Consuelo. The incredibly well executed exhibition Consuelo Kanaga: catch the mind Demonstrates that even if she is little known today, Kanaga was a major photographer of her time. Not only was she one of the first women photojournalists in the United States, but she also participated in major photographic groups of F / 64 At New York Photo League. The spectacle clearly indicates how large (deep) his artistic community was, highlighting his links with figures like Dorothea Lange,, Berenice Abbott,, Imogen CunninghamYamazawa Eiko, and Alfred stieglitz. Its production varied from socially committed photojournalism to artistic portrait to modernist abstraction, with a wink to Spiritual photography In there too. We could write a photographic story of the first half of the 20th century through its life story. It is an amazing curriculum vitae.
Despite the extent of his work, a “style” Kanaga Clé emerges from nearly 200 works in sight. Each photograph is composed with immense care. Thanks to her camera goal, she shapes her subjects in a kind of perfect geometry, bringing them together very well, like pieces in a puzzle. This is particularly true for its portraits and architectural photographs, such as “She is a Tree of Life” (1950) and “Clapboard Schoolhouse” (c. 1935). At the same time, she never practices the kind of modernist defamiarization often associated with such formal precision: her human subjects capture you with their intimate gaze, even suffocating you, as in the portrait of Kanaga de la Veuve Annie Mae Merriweather, whose husband was lynched for the organization of the Union. “Camelia in water” (1927-1928) indicates the wider modernist tradition of photographing glass and flowers in vases (see André Gardener), although the wall text that accompanies it quoting Kanaga demonstrates the deep humanity of its modern vision: “I photographed it because someone had removed it from the reverse of its coat in my studio and I threw it on the table.
Catch the mind Kanaga justice also, in his attention to details. By first presenting the photographer in the context of his community, viewers have an immediate idea of whom she was both as an artist and nobody. (It is also a nice touch as the same type of camera and film that it used is exposed, because this side of photography is so easily obscured in our dematerialized digital world.) The design of the exhibition maximizes its impact on the striking juxtaposition of red and blue-gray Colors of wall paint, which means that the piece itself looks like a well-composed work of art. In a somewhat unusual but welcome decision, several different impressions of a single photograph lean side by side in places, demonstrating the technical side of Kanaga's printing when she experienced the framing and the exhibition. (The curator drew Sawyer Continue to adjust a high bar For him for the next 2026 Whitney Biennalewith which he co-organized Marcela Guerrero.) And while commercial, documentary and “fine arts” photographs are often closed with each other, Catch the mind does nothing, revealing the deep ties between these modes through the life of a crucial twentieth century photographer that history has forgotten.
Consuelo Kanaga: catch the mind Continue at Brooklyn Museum (200 Eastern Parkway, Brooklyn) until August 3. The exhibition was organized by the Brooklyn Museum in collaboration with Fundación Mapfre and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He was organized by Pauline Vermare with Imani Williford.
