Unveiling Collar City: A Conversation with Brenda Ann Kenneally

Abstract

This interview with Brenda Ann Kenneally took place during her six-month residency at VSW. Kenneally came to VSW to build a series of books of photographs from her ongoing project Upstate Girls, in which she investigates the hallmarks of the permanent culture of class disparity in the US by documenting the lives of a group of working-class young women living on the same block in Troy, New York (near where Kenneally herself grew up). The city of Troy is one of the earliest centers of the American industrial revolution, and Kenneally incorporates the city's history into her hard and intimate look at post-industrial life in Troy. Kenneally worked with students at VSW to build a historical timeline. She also worked with students at Rochester Institute of Technology (PIT) to build a layered documentary website incorporating the videos, photographs, and historical documents she has made and collected. Kenneally is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Award, a Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship, and the Mother Jones Award for her in-depth and intimate coverage of complex social issues and injustice. She was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her work covering Hurricane Katrina. MEREDITH DAVENPORT: Let's start with who you are and what you're doing here at VSW. BRENDA ANN KENNEALLY: I'm a visual journalist, now that everybody is, and I am living here now at VSW, fulfilling the print portion of one of my lifelong dreams. In my twenty-year career I have been juggling photography, video, and now visual history projects. This project, called Upstate Girls, I started in 2004. It just snowballed into a participatory media project, doing scrapbooks with the young women I've been documenting, collecting historic ephemera, audio interviews, and contextualization from the town they live in, Troy, New York. About a year ago, I met Tate Shaw [Director of VSW1 after doing a talk at nearby RIT. We hit it off immediately and decided that this kind of project is something that has so many layers that it's very open for a lot of students to work on. I need lots of help. Here I am, a few months later, and I've come with a carload full of digital material. What I'm working on here specifically, in conjunction with RIT, is a web database project, and in conjunction with VSW, a series of five print books that will be about a hundred pages each--really cheaply printed and not precious at all--that are the stories of these eight young women in Troy. The birth of a child, De Anthony (Tony) Stocklas, was the genesis of the project. It was a relationship that started with two young women who were fourteen years old at the time, who were romantically and physically involved with each other. One girl, Kayla, became pregnant by the other girl's cousin. I was on an editorial assignment close to the neighborhood where I grew up and I was invited to photograph Kayla's labor and delivery of her son, Tony. And it is a history of prison and incarceration surrounding the family, because the boy, the cousin of Sabrina, the other young woman, went to prison, and the two girls teamed up basically to parent Tony, who is now nine years old. That is the genesis of the project, but I began to see all these connections: the prison culture, the fact that these were not the only young girls sometimes deliberately having babies. I started to think of the incarceration figures, the fact that we still continue to imprison more people than any other country in the world. Of course it's men--it's seeping over into women, but it's men: black men, Hispanic men, poor white men--and then working its way up the socioeconomic scale to women in that color spectrum. I began to think about the real boots-on-the-ground impact of just having fewer men around, the way men were thought about, the way relationships changed between mother and son. The emasculation of men, the fact that they really didn't have control in their own homes or their own lives, but largely they would answer to the authorities who were outside the home--and that authority was the paternal influence in the home--but really the physical influence was the women. …