Brenda Ann Kenneally is a mother, teacher, multiplatform documentarian, Guggenheim Fellow, Pulitzer Prize nominee, and formerly incarcerated youth. Over the past thirty years, Kenneally’s long-form, immersive projects have produced visceral portraits of the personal experiences of disadvantaged children in America, as well as a ground-up historic record of contemporary social and political values in the United States. “ In the tradition of Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City (Regan Arts), is an eye-opening portrait of the rise and fall of the American working class, and a shockingly intimate visual history of Troy, New York that arcs over five hundred years—from Henry Hudson to the industrial revolution to a group of contemporary young women as they grow, survive, and love. Welcome to Troy, New York. The land where mastodon roamed, the Mohicans lived, and the Dutch settled in the seventeenth century. What began as a brief assignment for The New York Times Magazine became an eye-opening portrait of the rise and fall of the American working class, and a shockingly intimate visual history of Troy that arcs over five hundred years. Kenneally beautifully layers archival images with her own photographs and collages to depict the transformations of this quintessentially American city. The result is a profound, powerful, and intimate look at America, at poverty, at the shrinking middle class, and of people as they grow, survive, and love.
