Consuelo Kanaga - Passion & Humanity: The Susie Tompkins Buell Collection New York Thursday, April 4, 2019 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Page Imageworks, San Francisco, 1995

  • Exhibited

    Object Lessons: Masterworks of Modernist Photography from Three Bay Area Collections, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, 7 December 1995 - 10 March 1996
    Collected, Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco, 2 May 2016 - 31 January 2017

  • Literature

    Pier 24 Photography, Collected, pp. 102 and 104 (this print)
    Millstein and Lowe, Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer, p. 66

  • Catalogue Essay

    In 1935, Kanaga photographed Annie Mae Merriweather for the leftist magazine the New Masses. Merriweather was the widow of Jim Press Merriweather, a sharecropper who was lynched in Lowndes County, Alabama, for his union activities. Merriweather’s harrowing account of her husband’s death, and her own torture at the hands of those who killed him, was published in the November 1935 issue of Labor Defender. Edward Steichen included this image in his 50 Photographs by 50 Photographers exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1948, and gave the Museum his personal print of the image which it retains today. Kanaga said of Merriweather, ‘When you look at her face, you can see all the sorrow and trouble in the world. And yet it is so beautiful' (quoted in Davidov, Women’s Camera Work, p. 205).

34

Annie Mae Merriweather

1935
Gelatin silver print.
12 1/2 x 9 3/4 in. (31.8 x 24.8 cm)
Credit stamp on the verso.

Estimate
$7,000 - 9,000 

Sold for $30,000

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Passion & Humanity: The Susie Tompkins Buell Collection

New York Auction 4 April 2019