PhD Candidate Brenda Kenneally's work featured in NYTimes Lens Blog and DigitalJournalist - Recent News

These articles accompany the recent launch of www.UpstateGirls.org, a venue for Brenda's extensive project on the women in Troy, NY. This website features her photographs from the Upstate Girls series, as well as trailers for the upcoming documentary, and a graphic novel on the lives of the women of Troy.

Read the feature stories in the New York Time's Lens Blog and in the October 2009 issue of the DigitalJournalist.org.

From the New York Times' Lens Blog:

"Brenda Ann Kenneally’s photo essay, “Upstate Girls,” documents the coming of age of five troubled young women in Troy, N.Y. It is a decidedly unromantic view of poverty, dysfunction and teen pregnancy."

"Sitting in her home in Brooklyn recently, Ms. Kenneally remembered one particular girl from Troy. This girl was in and out of the juvenile court system. She was involved with a much older boy at 12, became pregnant at 14, had an abortion, was immersed in drugs, and spent a year living in a group home. The odds were stacked against this teenager ever getting out of the cycle of poverty and despair that haunted her neighborhood. But she did."

"The girl was Brenda Ann Kenneally."  (read more)

Kenneally's Project Notes
As a journalist and activist I have dedicated my life to exploring the how and why of class inequity in America. I am concerned with the internalized social messages that will live on for generations after our economic and social policies catch up with the reality of living on the bottom rung of America's upwardly mobile society. My project explores the way that money is but a symptom of self-worth and a means by which humans separate from each other. Poverty is an emotional rather than physical state with layers of marginalization to cement those who live under them into their place. The economic crisis as it is called has done some to take the moral sting out of being poor, though the conversation remains centered on economic rather than social stimulus relief. Thus indicating that the crux of the crisis is for those that are recently without money rather than Americans whose ongoing struggles left them unfazed by the headlines.