[The Guardian] The big picture: Consuelo Kanaga’s portrait of a young woman in the deep south, 1948

The big picture: Consuelo Kanaga’s portrait of a young woman in the deep south, 1948

The photojournalist, a pioneer in portraiture of Black Americans, took this shot in Tennessee during the era of Jim Crow

Consuelo Kanaga took this picture of a young woman in Tennessee in 1948. Kanaga had by that time been working as a professional photographer for 33 years, having got her first job at the San Francisco Chronicle at the age of 21. She was a pioneer in portraiture of Black Americans, through the era of Jim Crow and into the civil rights movement, chronicling the Harlem Renaissance and the painfully slow loosening of segregation in the south.

This image is included in a new retrospective book of Kanaga’s work. The portrait of the young woman is typical of Kanaga’s handling of light; a gentleness learned living with families in the projects of San Francisco in the previous decade. The framing offers a visual reference to the art of silhouette, reserved for mostly elite – and white – profiles before the advent of photography. Kanaga presents a simple profile, but her eye dwells on the light and shade of her subject’s interiority with all the painterly care of an old master. The headband and the frilled collar and the eyes fixed – hopefully? resignedly? – toward an uncertain future post-second world war add to the effect. “Young is old in poor cultures,” Kanaga once said.

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