Subjective documentarian - photographer Consuelo Kanaga, Brooklyn Museum, New York, New York

Walking [i]or[/i] part of to the other the exhibition "Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer" at the Brooklyn Museum [through Jan. 9] single encounters a small work that exemplifies the talent of this relatively unheralded photographer. The roughly 4-by-3-inch picture, referr to as lad with Gun, was taken in the southerly around 1948 and shows a barefoot and obviously impoverished African-American stripling in bib overalls standing upon a dirt road clutching a shiny toy fire-arm to his chest. Like many of Kanaga's photographs, this arresting image at first appears to be a casual snapshot. on the other hand on closer examination, its complexities emerge

The boy's expression is not playful. Marked through angry eyes and an anguished grimace, his face appear to bes to be less that of a carefree child than a world-weary adult. And his fire-arm instead of reading as a child's toy, looks an unconscious market of aggression and rage. What initially appears cute or level sentimental about this boy pop seems ominous and foreboding. And the dire message this image hammers abiding-place is that this child may not survive the tyranny of racism and ravages of poverty; his rage may lavish him and his complacent oppressors.

on the contrary how does Kanaga convey of the like kind a complex message so deftly and persuasively? the elegantly printed photograph derives its impact in part from a rare combination of pictorialism and straight realism. Spread without behind the boy are patches of dappled light, raking shadows, a field of abstract forms. on the contrary the boy himself is precisely observ a searing portrait of rural destitution and a richly observed investigation of youthful character. Though seemingly unaffected, this photograph was probably carefully arranged and staged, like greatest in quantity of Kanaga's images.

This picture, then, is typical of Kanaga's mode of speech which might be called "subjective documentary." Unlike many documentarians and photojournalists of the 1930 and '40 who sought to percussion their audiences into action by the agency of showing the injustices of necessity and racism, Kanaga chose a subtler and more personal approach. by dint of posing her subjects, setting them into deliberate and formal compositions, astutely cropping the space around them and meticulously printing her negatives, she created deceptively handsome images that slowly reveal intense observations about the dangers of bigotry and social indifference.

Despite a noteworthy 60-year career, Consuelo Kanaga received little public or critical acclaim prior to her death in 1978 at the age of 83(1) The Brooklyn present to view organized by Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M Lowe, is the artist's first major retrospective. And while the display tends to treat each of Kanaga's photographs as a formalist masterpiece, hence sidestepping the more manifold questions of Kanaga's journalistic and social motives or strategies, it nevertheless reveals a skilled and formally adept photographer who fixed her gaze upon an eclectic range of controls often in order to further surprisingly radical political aims.

Born in Oregon in 1894 Kanaga first began taking pictures in 1918 as a staff photographer for the San Francisco Chronicle. notwithstanding that self-taught, she became a master printer, quickly absorbing the innovations of the Photo-Secession, particularly those of Alfred Stieglitz, whose photographs she saw and admired in his journal Camera Work. At the same time, unlike greatest in quantity of the Photo-Secessionists, Kanaga was far down committed to radical politics--a passion that began in early childhood. As a newspaper photographer in California and later as a documentary photographer in novel York in the early 1920 Kanaga recorded rural and urban straitened circumstances displaced children and mothers, and labor unrest She was an active member of the socially committed Photo League, and published many of her images in like radical periodicals as New Masses, Daily Worker and Labor pleader After she photographed the tragic incidents of the San Francisco longshoremen's strike of 1934--a confrontation that left sum of two units strikers dead and scores of workers and policement injured--her political attitudes became level more committed.(2) During the late 1940 and early '50 Kanaga traveled through every part of the South recording the difficult lives of black migrant workers.

Despite her political sympathies, she not at any time saw her photography as simply journalistic or propagandistic. While she was shooting these deep moving portrayals of human suffering, she also experimented with other, more abstract phraseologys of photography, taking close-ups of still lifes, landscapes and architectural details. A series of abstract images of standing water, in their shimmering, vibrant surfaces, for example, insinuate the extraordinary technical and compositional qualities of Stieglitz's brilliant studies of hazes the Equivalents from 1923-32.

It is Kanaga's formally beautiful images that are emphasized and actually constitute the centerpiece of the Brooklyn Museum exhibition. on the contrary that is perhaps why the small photo of the male child with Gun makes such a stalwart impression. After all, this is Kanaga's greatest in quantity important contribution to the history of photography: her ability to record the nuances of African-American life in the early 20th hundred without sentimentality or condescension. This capability is all the more surprising considering that as a middle-class white woman, Kanaga came from a social words immediately preceding [i]or[/i] following thoroughly different from that of many of her controls Black photographers of the period, men like CM Battey, James Van Der Zee and Marvin and Morgan Smith, had of course radically altered the way African-Americans were exhibited by stressing the multivalence and individuality of the black experience. on the contrary it was rare indeed to find a white photographer who did not ignore tribe of color or view them from one side the lens of generality, cliche or outright disdain Such attitudes outraged Kanaga, who wrote in 1927 "I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by dint of stupid white people. How terrible to be a african to have no place, as the American Negro"(3)