Ellen Macfarlane – författare

A substantial new appraisal of Consuelo Kanaga (1894–1978), one of the pioneers of modern American photography. 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 200 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 20th-century photographers. Published to accompany a major touring exhibition from 2024–2026 at Fundación MAPFRE, Barcelona; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; and Brooklyn Museum, New York.

In Politics Unseen, Ellen Macfarlane radically reframes the "pure photographs" of California art photography society Group f.64, known for depicting Western landscapes, fruits and vegetables, flowers, and faces. By foregrounding f.64 members’ and their prints’ alliances across commercial, political, and artistic domains, the book shatters entrenched understandings of the group as disinterested in contemporary events and unseats conceptions of its prints as icons of modernist purity. Instead, Politics Unseen argues the politics of f.64’s photographs become visible when interwar ideas about "purity" in the areas of eugenics, racial essence, nutrition, colonialism, and horticulture are interrogated. Ultimately, Politics Unseen alters perceptions not only of f.64, but also of what constituted a political image in 1930s America.