Brenda Ann Kenneally
I met the “Upstate Girls “ while on assignment for the New York Times Magazine in 2003. The block in Troy, New York, was very close to the neighborhood where I had grown up. I completed the assignment and felt compelled to stay on after meeting so many of the teenage girls in Troy who were living the life that I would have lived, had I not hitchhiked to Florida after my own first sixteen years of “upstate girl-ness.” I have now spent five years worth of afternoons filled with kids in paneled rooms killing time till mothers drag in from work. Days spent photographing girls on Sixth Avenue in Troy collapsed the decades between my own glassed-in front porch on Second Avenue, the key under the mat after school, and my new life as a sophisticated professional. I tried to escape by distancing myself with some external lens, but it is still me after school, glued to the television set, reading the back of the cereal box and wanting to be in love.
“Upstate Girls” is an attempt to unravel the complex causes and effects of America’s diehard dream. Troy was the “most important city during the Industrial Revolution” and exemplified possibilities for the future of our nation. Ambition turned naked and our greatest asset became our greatest liability. The contemporary generation of female workers, akin to the strong women who built the Collar City labor movement in the 1800s, now form a permanent underclass of low wage-earners in the U.S. service economy.
Attempts to repackage the region as a “tech valley” translate into a further class divide. The future offers little in the way of interesting prospects, and long-term goals seem pointless. Years compressing metamorphic layers of need mistaken for choice reinforce a young woman’s feeling of being buried beneath her own life, and kill the autonomy so essential for radical change.
Link : Intreview Brenda Ann Kenneally on photographie.com
