She is a Tree of Life to Them was made by Consuelo Kanaga in Maitland, Florida, where she had taken up brief residence in an artists’ colony in the winter of 1950. Venturing into the reclaimed agricultural swampland around Maitland, she documented the lives of African-American field workers. The image gained icon status, as well as its title, in Edward Steichen’s 1955 blockbuster exhibition The Family of Man. There it was paired with a phrase from Proverbs 3:18—‘She is a tree of life to them that lay hold upon her: and happy is everyone that retaineth her’—and has been known by that title ever since. For Steichen, the photograph represented an archetype of motherhood, and he often referred to it as one of his favorite images in the show. He wrote, ‘How completely this picture speaks . . . for itself! This woman has been drawing her children to her, protecting them, for thousands of years against hurt and discrimination’ (The New York Times Magazine, 29 April 1962, pp. 62-63).
The photograph offered here is the very print shown in Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer, the definitive retrospective of her work at The Brooklyn Museum in 1994. It was loaned to that exhibition by Charles and Lucille Plotz, the original owners of the photograph.
Few photographers’ lives have threaded in and out of the history of 20th-century photography as did Consuelo Kanaga’s. Born in Oregon, she began her photographic career at the San Francisco Chronicle, and from there her work in the medium brought her into contact with a whole host of notables: from Albert Bender to Alfred Stieglitz, from photographers associated with Group f.64 to those of New York’s Photo League. A true individualist, she connected deeply with her colleagues in the field, but declined to become a member of any movement or devote herself to a single ideology. In a career that spanned decades, her approach to photography was driven exclusively by an overriding sense of empathy for her subjects.
Much of Kanaga’s work is focused on the African-American experience. Her photographs avoided the cliché, the dramatized, or the sentimental, and focused instead on the dignity of the individuals who came before her camera. She was socially progressive in a segregated America and a passionate champion of those ill-treated or ignored by society.
