Consuelo Kanaga – Catch the Spirit
Drew Sawyer, Thames & Hudson, £50

FEW will have come across the name Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978), although she was one of the most influential US photographers during the first half of the 20th century. She suffered the same fate as so many women artists: consigned to the museum of amnesia. It is therefore cause for celebration that T&H, together with the Brooklyn Museum and Mapfre have collaborated on this volume dedicated to her work and helping rescue her from oblivion.

The range of Kanaga’s work is quite extraordinary. It ranges from shots of daily life on the streets of New York and San Francisco, scenes of North African life, to iconic portraits of leading US artists, and particularly for its focus on Afro-American life.
 
Kanaga was born in 1894 in Oregon, into a white middle-class family. In 1911 the family moved from Oregon to California, where, in 1915, Kanaga found a job as a reporter, feature writer and part-time photographer on the San Francisco Chronicle, and there discovered Alfred Sieglitz’s seminal journal Camera Work. She also encountered that other great female photographer, Dorothea Lange, and it was Lange who encouraged her to take up photography as a career and introduced her to the growing San Francisco Bay Area community of artistic photographers, notably Anne Brigman, Edward Weston and Louise Dahl.