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).