Why wasn’t I born black? “I would have loved it!” The American photographer Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978) was interested above all in life, in her relationship with others, which she put before her own work. “Usually when you refer to someone as ‘unconventional’ you mean someone who breaks the rules; she had no rules,” would say Dorothea Lange, her colleague with whom she shared interests and the necessary courage to go in search of the individual in every crowd. But Kanaga went beyond her, directing her exceptionally close and empathetic gaze toward black people at a time when they were relegated to the margins. She sympathized with her struggles and was drawn to her beauty. Her works on African Americans, which made her one of the most prominent figures of her time, are at the heart of Catching the Spirit, her first European anthology, organized by the KBr of the Mapfre Foundation in collaboration with the MoMA of San Francisco and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, the two great North American museums where it will stop after passing through Barcelona (until May 12) and Madrid.
Over six decades, Kanaga was actively involved in leftist movements such as the Photo League, and documented everything from urban poverty and labor rights to racial terror and social inequalities. In 1915, at age 21, he began as a journalist at the San Francisco Chronicle. “She always accompanied the photographer and gave him instructions in such detail that the editor of the publication encouraged her to learn the technique from scratch and take the photographs herself, becoming one of the first photojournalists in history,” says Drew Sawyer, curator of photography at the Whitney Museum and a great connoisseur of Kanaga’s work, who had the opportunity to study it in depth during his time as star curator of the Brooklyn Museum, a center that guards a collection that, although it is the largest, consists only of 2,500 negatives and 500 vintage copies.
Kanaga herself explained in an interview that most of the photographs from the early period were lost or damaged, or she had to throw them away herself due to her continuous travels. “Life has been a continuous change,” he declared, and Sawyer adds that “he became engaged and married on several occasions, often leaving his life on hold,” having to work numerous jobs to support his partners and reserving his ends. of the week for your creative activity. In 1944, she married for the last time with the painter Wallace Putnam, into whose career she devoted herself and with whom she lived until the end of her life. She was 83 years old, she was allergic to self-promotion and her reputation was already fading.
Long before Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936) (flanked by two of her ten children, staring into an empty future) became one of the most iconic images of American culture, Kanaga portrayed another mother with a similar composition, also surrounded by her little ones, eyes of fear focused towards the ground. She took it in the early twenties, as The Widow Watson 1922, an emaciated woman prematurely aged by tuberculosis who lives with her 12-year-old son in a damp cellar. her while she was a reporter for the New York American. “The great alchemy is your attitude, who you are, what you are. When you take a photograph, it is largely an image of yourself. That’s what’s important. Most try to impress to attract attention. But I think the important thing is not to capture the view, but the spirit,” declared Kanaga, who ran her own portrait studio to earn extra income.
In 1927, a trip through Europe and North Africa, financed by Albert M. Bender, opened his mind to questions related to racial differences, which would determine all the work that followed. In a letter to his patron, he writes from Paris: “There are no color distinctions here at all. The most beautiful white women are seen freely in the company of black men. I think it’s wonderful. I’m tired of seeing women and men of color mistreated by stupid white people. How terrible to be black and not have a place, as happens to black Americans, for example.” And at another moment, she will remember: “One day I saw the first black man in Paris. He was tall, handsome and proud, and he had none of the insolence or aggressiveness of our blacks in America. He was like a child who knew he was welcome and loved, and I must admit that his beautiful, calm face was a joy to me. He was the first free black man I had seen.”
Kanaga took penetratingly beautiful portraits of anonymous people, activists, and also intellectuals and artists, such as the sculptor William Edmondson or Kenneth Sepencer. She was not the only white woman who dedicated herself to portraying African Americans, but her great contribution, the curator concludes, was her ability “to create photographs that are not only beautiful but also political.”