Latest update: 08/09/2009 

- International festival of photojournalism - photography - USA


Grandeur and misery through Kenneally's lens
Grandeur and misery through Kenneally's lens
At the International Festival of Photojournalism in Perpignan in southern France, Brenda Ann Kenneally is exhibiting “Upstate Girls”, a five-year investigation into the American working class of which she herself is a product.
By Sarah LEDUC (text)

Related links

On the web

Brenda Ann Kenneally is what is known as a character. Dressed in black from head to foot and adorned with nose

piercings, as well as henna tattoos, from her ankles to her wrists, she arrives more than an hour late. Her previous interview ran late, she talked too much. But she is inexhaustible.  



Brenda Ann Kenneally
Terry in her room at the YWCA in Troy, New York.

 

Troy was not picked at random. Kenneally grew up there, in a home environment similar to those she photographs. Her father, an alcoholic gambling addict, left when she was still a child. Left to her own devices early in life, she fell into delinquency.

 

She was sent to reform school by the age of 12 and had become a drug addict by 16, later fleeing to Florida when she turned 18. It was a descent into hell that lasted more than 10 years. At 26, she took control of her life again and began rehabilitation. Although attracted by singing, it is through photos that she truly found her voice.

 

“When I started to take pictures, it just felt right,” she says. And armed with this proof, she no longer lets go of her camera.

 

It's just by chance that she went back to Troy, in the form of an assignment for Time magazine. While rediscovering the past she had fled, she decided to focus her work on the women she could have become.

 

“My goal with my hometown was to get out of my hometown,” she says. “I wouldn’t be here today if I hadn’t left. I don’t even know if I would be alive. In many ways, it was toxic to me. I saw much of this with these girls. I’d be like them if I hadn’t left 20 years ago.”

 
 

Having lived in New York City with her son since 1996, Kenneally has not forgotten where she comes from and has dedicated many years to understanding America’s social misery. With “Upstate Girls”, she tries to unravel the causes and consequences of the American dream.

 

She points out the perverse effects of globalisation that make up the visual and social landscape of the United States. But it is not so much the US system that she criticises but an excessive sense of individualism



Close