The hamburger guy Sausalito August 25th, 2023
Jessica Zack October 7, 2024 Updated: October 7, 2024, 4:10 am - San Francisco Chronicle
When Consuelo Kanaga took her famous 1935 portrait photo of grieving Annie Mae Merriweather, a woman whose husband had been killed by an Alabama lynch mob, the renowned Bay Area photographer had already spent two decades refining her craft and establishing her reputation on both coasts as a key figure in modern photography.
Kanaga’s life’s work is now being celebrated with her first West Coast career retrospective, “Consuelo Kanaga: Catch the Spirit,” on view through Feb. 9 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art .
“It’s incredibly exciting to open this exhibition in San Francisco,” especially given Kanaga’s California roots and significant place in photographic history, curator Drew Sawyer told the Chronicle. He started envisioning the exhibition in 2018 at the Brooklyn Museum, which has held a collection of 2,000 negatives and 340 prints since Kanaga’s death in 1978. (The show will open in Brooklyn next spring.)
“There’s been terrific scholarship on Kanaga by young scholars in recent years, so this felt like the right moment to reassess her work and introduce her to new audiences,” he continued, mentioning art historian Ellen McFarlane, who has an essay in the catalog, whose book reexamining the Group f.64 and Kanaga’s work, “Politics Unseen,” is due out in January.
Kanaga, who grew up in a socially engaged family in Marin, launched her career in 1915 as a 21-year-old reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. Drawn to the image over the word, she taught herself darkroom skills and soon became one of the first female staff photojournalists at a major U.S. newspaper.
She roamed the city with her camera, capturing images of bison in Golden Gate Park, residents in Chinatown and striking longshoremen at Bayfront docks , and developed a strong desire to sensitively document social inequities. Among Kanaga’s most famous photos are numerous portraits of Black San Franciscans, at home and at work, taken in the 1930s when few such positive images existed in popular media.
SFMOMA honors Consuelo Kanaga with first West Coast retrospective
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