Dec 13, 2011 - Sale 2265

Sale 2265 - Lot 45

Price Realized: $ 11,400
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 3,000 - $ 4,500
KANAGA, CONSUELO (1894-1978)
Album containing 23 original photographs of Kairouan, Tunisia, including a host of intimate portraits of native peoples (especially children) and lyrical landscapes. Silver prints, 3x4 inches (7.6x10.2 cm.), and the reverse, each with a handwritten caption, in ink; the final leaf contains a wonderful letter to her mother. 4to, pictorial vellum over boards, lightly soiled. 1928
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This apparently unique album, which reflects Kanaga's special gifts as a photographer, also reflects the influences of Alfred Stieglitz (with whom she studied in 1922) and Tina Modotti (whose work she showed in her studio, in 1926). The pictures offer a glimpse into this young photographer's emerging aesthetic, which is at once accomplished and sensitive.

According to Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah Lowe, who co-authored the monograph Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer, Kanaga traveled to Tunisia with Louise Dahl-Wolfe. (Five of the pictures in the album are reproduced in this volume). The first photograph, which bears many of the hallmarks of a Julia Margaret Cameron photograph, was either a self-portrait or taken by Dahl-Wolfe.