Photographing poverty in America - Brenda Ann Kenneally (The New Yorker)

November 20, 2018 12:54 PM

A Portrait of Love and Struggle in Post-Industrial, Small-City America By Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Shaming people who live in poverty is an old reflex in America. Kenneally reminds us that the fault lines of capitalism are everywhere within our nation, running through the very foundation we keep building upon. Her excavations blast through any attempt to deny it. In her book’s opening essay, she refers to her photographs as “new fossils.” With taking pictures, Kenneally writes, “comes the power to manufacture a record that future generations will consider fact.” Whether we choose to look or not, these images are facts.
posted by bluesky43 (3 comments total)

Thank you for posting this! I can't wait to read it. I first heard about this work when some of it was published in the Times a few years back, and this year at the NY Art Book Fair I saw the Upstate Girls book and it was revelatory. I grew up in Troy (albeit only for a few years as a teenager—the same age as many of her subjects) and have family there still, and these pictures so viscerally captured the city I remember that it spooked me a little. My adolescence there was troubled and the pictures bring it back so vividly than I can only look at them in small doses. At the Art Book Fair I was able to spend a few minutes speaking with Ms. Kenneally about the history of the project and gentrification in NYC and in Hudson Valley communities like Troy. Her presence is as compelling as her photographs and that conversation is a treasured memory for me.
posted by enn at 2:52 PM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Earlier here.
posted by Ideefixe at 4:37 PM on November 20, 2018 [1 favorite]

Poverty in America causes effects as real as solitary confinement just hidden and protected by shame. Capitalism buries the real heavy cost of their business model. Never see these folks in the main media, ever.
posted by Freedomboy at 6:38 PM on November 20, 2018