Consuelo Kanaga took this picture of a young woman in Tennessee in 1948. Kanaga had by that time been working as a professional photographer for 33 years, having got her first job at the San Francisco Chronicle at the age of 21. She was a pioneer in portraiture of Black Americans, through the era of Jim Crow and into the civil rights movement, chronicling the Harlem Renaissance and the painfully slow loosening of segregation in the south.

This image is included in a new retrospective book of Kanaga’s work. The portrait of the young woman is typical of Kanaga’s handling of light; a gentleness learned living with families in the projects of San Francisco in the previous decade. The framing offers a visual reference to the art of silhouette, reserved for mostly elite – and white – profiles before the advent of photography. Kanaga presents a simple profile, but her eye dwells on the light and shade of her subject’s interiority with all the painterly care of an old master. The headband and the frilled collar and the eyes fixed – hopefully? resignedly? – toward an uncertain future post-second world war add to the effect. “Young is old in poor cultures,” Kanaga once said.

The photographer lived to be 83, and saw some of those hopes for a fairer society fulfilled. Her best known image, She Is a Tree of Life to Them, a picture of a mother and her two young sons, became one of the defining photographs of Edward Steichen’s celebrated Family of Man exhibition in 1955. Kanaga died in 1978, leaving behind an archive of only about 2,500 negatives and 375 gelatin silver prints. Recent years have seen her reclaimed as a transcendent artist: “If I could make one true, quiet photograph,” she said, “I would much prefer it to having a lot of answers.”

• Consuelo Kanaga is published by Thames & Hudson (£50). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply