The last name "Kanaga" is of Swiss origin, and a family genealogy traces its roots back at least 250 years.

Her middle name "Delesseps" is said to have come from her mother's admiration for Ferdinand de Lesseps, the French diplomat and developer of the Suez Canal.

Lange encouraged her to take up photography as a career and introduced her to the growing San Francisco Bay Area community of artistic photographers, notably Anne Brigman, Edward Weston, Francis Bruguière, and Louise Dahl.

Aided by art patron Albert Bender, she planned a prolonged "tour" of Europe, and in 1927 she spent the latter part of the year traveling and photographing in France, Germany, Hungary and Italy.

While traveling to Tunisia in January 1928, she met James Barry McCarthy, an Irish writer and ex-pilot, and by March they were married.

Kanaga initially found work as a photographic retoucher, but within a few months she had her own darkroom and was printing the first of her many photos from Europe.

In 1931 she met and began to employ African-American Eluard Luchell McDaniels, a young "man-of-all-trades" who worked for her as a handyman and chauffeur.

"[4] In an interview later in her life, Kanaga herself said "I was in that f/64 show with Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Willard Van Dyke and Ansel Adams, but I wasn't in a group, nor did I belong to anything ever.

In 1938 she joined the Photo League, where she lectured a new generation of artistic photographers and became the leader of the Documentary Group projects, including Neighborhoods of New York.

[6] Her photographs were printed in progressive publications of the time, including New Masses, Labor Defender, and Sunday Worker.

A review published in The New York Times described that "She continued to work into her 70s, despite suffering from emphysema and cancer, which were probably caused by the chemicals used in creating her prints.

Significantly, the four prints she contributed to the first Group f/64 exhibition were all portraits of blacks, including two of Eluard Luchell McDaniel, whom she would photograph repeatedly in ensuing years.

Kanaga's best-known image, "She Is a Tree of Life to Them,"[10] was given its title by Edward Steichen when he selected it for the landmark Family of Man exhibition in 1955.

The picture, from a study of migrant workers in Florida, portrays a slender black woman, framed against a white wall, who gathers her children to her with a tender gesture.

In 1974 Kanaga had a one-person exhibition at the Lerner-Heller Gallery in New York and in 1976, a small but important retrospective at The Brooklyn Museum.

They were all drawn from a cache of more than 2000 negatives and 340 prints left to the Brooklyn Museum in 1982 by the artist's husband and painter, Wallace Putnam.

A fully illustrated catalogue published by the Brooklyn Museum in association with University of Washington Press accompanied the exhibition.