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

Walking through the exhibition "Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer" at the Brooklyn Museum [through Jan. 9], one encounters a small work that exemplifies the talent of this relatively unheralded photographer. The roughly 4-by-3-inch picture, referred to as Boy with Gun, was taken in the South around 1948 and shows a barefoot and obviously impoverished African-American boy in bib overalls standing on a dirt road clutching a shiny toy gun to his chest. Like many of Kanaga's photographs, this arresting image at first appears to be a casual snapshot. But on closer examination, its complexities emerge.

The boy's expression is not playful. Marked by angry eyes and an anguished grimace, his face seems to be less that of a carefree child than a world-weary adult. And his gun, instead of reading as a child's toy, seems an unconscious market of aggression and rage. What initially appears cute or even sentimental about this boy suddenly seems ominous and foreboding. And the dire message this image hammers home is that this child may not survive the tyranny of racism and ravages of poverty; his rage may consume him and his complacent oppressors.

But how does Kanaga convey such 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 out behind the boy are patches of dappled light, raking shadows, a field of abstract forms. But the boy himself is precisely observed, a searing portrait of rural poverty and a richly observed study of youthful character. Though seemingly unaffected, this photograph was probably carefully arranged and staged, like most of Kanaga's images.

This picture, then, is typical of Kanaga's style, which might be called "subjective documentary." Unlike many documentarians and photojournalists of the 1930s and '40s, who sought to shock their audiences into action by showing the injustices of poverty and racism, Kanaga chose a subtler and more personal approach. By 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 show, organized by Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe, is the artist's first major retrospective. And while the show tends to treat each of Kanaga's photographs as a formalist masterpiece, hence sidestepping the more complex questions of Kanaga's journalistic and social motives or strategies, it nevertheless reveals a skilled and formally adept photographer who fixed her gaze on an eclectic range of subjects, 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. Though 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 most of the Photo-Secessionists, Kanaga was deeply committed to radical politics--a passion that began in early childhood. As a newspaper photographer in California and later as a documentary photographer in New York in the early 1920s, Kanaga recorded rural and urban poverty, 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 such radical periodicals as New Masses, Daily Worker and Labor Defender. After she photographed the tragic events of the San Francisco longshoremen's strike of 1934--a confrontation that left two strikers dead and scores of workers and policement injured--her political attitudes became even more committed.(2) During the late 1940s and early '50s, Kanaga traveled throughout the South recording the difficult lives of black migrant workers.

Despite her political sympathies, she never saw her photography as simply journalistic or propagandistic. While she was shooting these deeply moving portrayals of human suffering, she also experimented with other, more abstract styles 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, suggest the extraordinary technical and compositional qualities of Stieglitz's brilliant studies of clouds, 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. But that is perhaps why the small photo of the Boy with Gun makes such a strong impression. After all, this is Kanaga's most important contribution to the history of photography: her ability to record the nuances of African-American life in the early 20th century without sentimentality or condescension. This capability is all the more surprising considering that as a middle-class white woman, Kanaga came from a social context thoroughly different from that of many of her subjects. Black photographers of the period, men like C.M. Battey, James Van Der Zee and Marvin and Morgan Smith, had of course radically altered the way African-Americans were represented by stressing the multivalence and individuality of the black experience. But it was rare indeed to find a white photographer who did not ignore people of color or view them through the lens of generality, cliche or outright contempt. Such attitudes outraged Kanaga, who wrote in 1927, "I am sick of seeing colored men and women abused by stupid white people. How terrible to be a Negro, to have no place, as the American Negro."(3)