Consuelo Kanaga

Barbara Head Millstein and Sarah M. Lowe, Consuelo Kanaga: An American Photographer (The Brooklyn Museum, 1992), p. 119

Born in Mississippi, Eluard Luchell McDaniels (1912 – 1985) left an abusive family at an early age to travel westward. He eventually arrived in San Francisco, where he met photographer Consuelo Kanaga, who took him into her home. He was subsequently able to graduate high school and go on to study art at San Francisco State College. He was active in the labor movement and the Communist party in the 1930s, and returned to the South during the Great Depression to help organize the Alabama Sharecroppers’ Union. An aspiring writer, he was involved with the Federal Writers Project and published short stories in the WPA publication ‘Just Stuff.’ After fighting in the Spanish Civil War and serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he worked in the Merchant Marines until he was forced from his post in the 1950s during the Red Scare. He returned to San Francisco, where he worked in a factory until retirement.

Kanaga’s portraits of McDaniels are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and the Brooklyn Museum.