Brenda Ann Kenneally

I was ten years into photographing what became our first book about Troy, New York; Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City 2004-2013, when one of the few professional peers I had managed to form a relationship with asked if I had considered that I might be “hiding out” in the work by staying so long with the same people and place. NO! My heart, mind and gut knew that when I was in Deb Stocklas’s kitchen I was at the center of the universe as a human and as a journalist. My intuition that every story in America could be told through life lived on the block of Sixth Avenue in North Troy has proved true. For the many pieces of domestic reporting that eventually made their way into The New York Times, the sprawling New Yorker essay or NPR newsfeed, I have seen connections as they unfolded in real time over years spent in somebody’s living room in this post-industrial neighborhood.

I met the families who would compel me to remain with them for twenty years in 2004, when I was invited to photograph 14-year-old Kayla Stocklas in labor and delivering her first child. Kayla lived in Troy, about ten minutes from where I was born, and where thirty years earlier I had gotten pregnant at fourteen and had an abortion. The birth of Kayla’s son, D’Anthony Stocklas, established the Stocklas family’s foothold into a generation further away from the possibility of upward mobility, and one generation closer to being cemented into the class inequity of their Victorian era counterparts who powered Troy’s factories in the late 19th and early 20th century.

Over the years I would come to know and document the Stocklas’s neighborhood family and support network as they extended along the historically low-wealth block of Sixth Avenue in North Troy. The Stocklas homestead, a dilapidated two-story wood frame with a pair of makeshift apartments on the top, meant homes for their children when they became parents and is a way to generate a bit of extra income for the grandparents who collect token amounts of monthly rent from their grown children. On hundreds of mornings I followed Deb Stocklas, the strong matriarch of the house that has been the center of our Upstate Girls extended family. I marveled at her strength as she dragged herself through long silent rooms full of a dozen sleeping bodies to muster a cup of Mr. Coffee resistance against the thick grey dawn that she pushes through on her way to work as a bus driver for students with special needs. Deb’s seven children and an array of grandchildren have come of age under this roof owned by her common-law husband who everyone calls Poppa Stocklas.