Consuelo Kanaga (1894-1978) was one of the pioneers of modern American photography. Beginning her career in 1915 as a photojournalist for the San Francisco Chronicle, Kanaga quickly became a highly skilled darkroom technician, developing a distinctly artistic aesthetic style inspired by the photography of Alfred Stieglitz. Over the next six decades, she produced beautifully composed images over a wide range of subjects, characterized by an abiding interest in the social conflicts of her time, including urban poverty, workers' rights, racial segregation, and prevailing inequality. She became especially known for her emotional and introspective portraits of African Americans, which combined modernist formal technique and radical documentary commentary. Featuring two hundred photographs from the collection of the Brooklyn Museum, this substantial new appraisal of Consuelo Kanaga's work establishes her place as one of America's most vital twentieth-century photographers. Published to accompany a major touring exhibition from 2024-2026 at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid; SanFrancisco Museum of Modern Art; and Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Consuelo Kanaga

Arts & Photography

Sawyer, Drew

Parker, Shalon

Macfarlane, Ellen

Lopes, Shana

Photography & Video

Thames&Hudson

Never-before-published work by an iconic woman artist from the very start of her career. Francesca Woodman took her first photograph at the age of the thirteen. From the time she was a teenager until her death at twenty-two, she produced a fascinating body of work exploring gender, representation, and sexuality by photographing her own body and those of her friends. Featuring approximately forty unique vintage prints, as well as notes, letters, postcards, and other ephemera related to the artist's burgeoning career, the volume, which accompanies an exhibition of the same name at MCA Denver, details both Woodman's creative and personal coming-of-age during the years 1975-1979. Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation considers how the artist came into her creative voice and her singular approach to photography at a notably young age. Ranging from portraits in her studio/apartment in college to self-portraits in the bucolic Colorado landscape in which she was raised, these works capture Woodman's hallmark approach to art making: enigmatic, rigorous, and poignant. The volume also includes select photographs of Woodman taken by friend and RISD classmate George Lange during this period. Taken together, they present a nuanced and in-depth study of this formative period in the development of this groundbreaking artist.

Francesca Woodman: Portrait of a Reputation

Burnett Abrams, Nora

Rizzoli Electa

Through essays, plates, and reproductions, the accompanying catalogue presents the range of photographs and other materials in the Community Service Society records. In the foreword, Maren Stange revisits her foundational study "Symbols of Ideal Life: Social Documentary Photography in America, 1890-1950" in which she wrote extensively about the photographic practices of the Charity Organization Society and addressed the ongoing significance of the collection to the history of photography. Huffa Frobes-Cross provides a review of the extensive literature regarding the limitations of a progressive documentary tradition, including critiques during the 1970s and 1980s by Susan Sontag, Martha Rosler, and Allan Sekula, among others. This essay historicizes these arguments while taking into consideration the growing field of scholarship that has developed on photography of suffering, violence and poverty. Drew Sawyer's essay focuses on the visual culture of housing reform to highlight the heterogeneous and changing visual strategies of these two organizations at the turn of the twentieth century. More specifically, the essay deals with abundance of overlooked photographs of architecture in the archive. In doing so, it provides a corrective to scholarship and criticism that has focused on images of people and suffering rather than the built environment.

Social Forces Visualized: Photography and Scientific Charity 1900-1920

Esq., David R. Jones

Frobes-Cross, Huffa

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

The Wallach Art Gallery

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Sawyer, Drew. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Sawyer, Drew