Upstate Girls - What Became of Collar City
Brenda Ann Kenneally
Winner of the 2008 Canon Female Photojournalist Award
2004 I met the “Upstate Girls “ while on assignment for the New York Times Magazine in 2003. A friend and colleague, Adrian Nicole Leblanc, had completed Random Family, a book that was to become extremely important for both literary and social science. The Times assigned me to take photographs for an excerpt that they were running in their Magazine. The block in Troy, New York, where the family in Adrian’s book lived, 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. My return to Upstate New York has brought back feelings even twenty years of Miami sun could not fade. 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. I drown myself in my work and I see all our lives.
Preview
You can never not go back home again. Yet my rational mind says…. “What is She Trying to Do?”
“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. Population growth over the past ten years in Upstate New York has stemmed from the prison industry. The victims of the culture of incarceration have been the same working class families that the laws should protect. This over-criminalization of the poor is self-perpetuating, straining the intimate relationships between husbands and wives, mothers and sons. Attempts to repackage the region as a “tech valley” translate into a further class divide. As a result, the future offers little in the way of interesting prospects, and long-term goals seem pointless. Physical and emotional instability changes the value of intimate relationships. 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.
Brenda Ann Kenneally, 2009, Brooklyn and Troy, New York
