Upstate Girls to Grown Upstate: Unraveling Collar City 2004–23
The Center for Photography at Woodstock
474 Broadway, Kingston, NY
On view: August 19–October 22, 2023
Opening: Saturday, August 19, 5-7pm
The exhibition Upstate Girls to Grown Upstate: Unraveling Collar City 2004–23 comprises new photography, video, and text by Brenda Ann Kenneally. This extraordinary project is one of the most fully realized documentary projects to trace the roots of intergenerational, community trauma to wealth and class inequity in America.
The CPW exhibition tracks what happened to Kenneally’s Upstate Girls community after her sold-out book Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City 2004–2013 (Regan Arts, 2018). When Kenneally began to realize that the crippling effects of internalized marginalization were being cemented in the young adults whose births and childhoods she was witnessing, she and her Upstate Girls community used those images as rallying points to create a counter narrative. In the summer of 2021, they all embarked on a road trip to the American West. The resulting work contrasts constricted, post-industrial cityscapes of the young people’s home town with expansive, wide-open landscapes of the West. The West’s vistas mirror a new possibility in the young people’s psyches, in which experiencing awe is life-saving, and magnificent horizons are a visceral space for change.
The origins of this project began when Kenneally, a native of Troy, NY, started photographing in 2004 by applying her laser-sharp, loving focus onto a group of girls from three extended families as they came of age on one block in North Troy. Early on, the people she was photographing became collaborators. Together, they expanded the project, ultimately building a multimedia, participatory epic. In this epic, we meet the fragile-strong networks of family and friends that form, dissolve and re-form: babies who as teens have babies, teens who graduate into prison, parents who take in other children, caretakers who parent stray young parents, siblings, cousins who have kids with friends, lovers who become friends who move in and leave, and move in again years later as lovers again.
Upstate Girls connects the origins of the systems shaping this community today back to the distinctly tiered class structure that, at the turn of the century, powered Troy, a small city known as the “prototype” for the industrialization of America. Kenneally’s multigenerational collaboration has produced a visceral record of the abandonment of our working class and an indictment of public policies that perpetuate it.
“We are proud to present the work of Brenda Ann Kenneally, one of America’s leading documentary photographers,” said Brian Wallis, CPW’s Executive Director. “Her meticulous, eye-opening twenty-year coverage of the daily lives of several families on a single block in Troy, NY, facing low-paying jobs, food scarcity, housing issues, serial incarceration, challenging relationships, teenage pregnancies, and single motherhood demonstrates how the oppression of working-class families pervades U.S. social, economic, educational, and legal systems.”
About the artist
Brenda Ann Kenneally is a multi-media documentary maker, Guggenheim Fellow, and activist whose visceral, long-form projects have broadened the humanistic scope of the documentary form. A frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine, Kenneally has won several major awards, including the The W. Eugene Smith Award for Humanistic Photography, a Soros Criminal Justice Fellowship, The Mother Jones Documentary Photography Award, the World Press Photo Award, a NYFA Grant, the Best of Photojournalism Award by the National Press Photographers Association, and several grants from New York State Council for The Arts.
Her 2006 book, Money, Power, Respect; Pictures of My Neighborhood (Chanel Photographics), is a decade-long look at the Brooklyn neighborhood where she and her son lived.
Her 2018 book Upstate Girls: What Became of Collar City 2004–2013 (Regan Arts, 2018) sold out. Published with Regan Arts, the book powerfully captures how the paucity of social, legal, and economic opportunities straight-jacket and harm the psyches of two generations of young people growing up in Troy, NY.
Kenneally founded A Little Creative Class in 2018 to address the social, and economic obstacles that deter low-income youth from participation in the idea-based, creative economy.
Banner image: Brenda Ann Kenneally, Sisters, Ellie and Rosie, Troy NY, 2023.