203 - Stacy Kranitz

Working within the documentary tradition, Stacy Kranitz makes photographs that acknowledge the limits of photographic representation. Her images do not tell the “truth” but are honest about their inherent shortcomings, and thus reclaim these failures (exoticism, ambiguity, fetishization) as sympathetic equivalents in order to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict.

Stacy was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography (2017), a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant (2020), a Puffin Foundation grant (2022), and a Center for Documentation Fellowship (2023). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019). She has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015), the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move festival in Cortona, Italy (2022) and the Tennessee Triennial (2023) Her photographs are in several public collections including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke Universities, Archive of Documentary Arts. Stacy works as an assignment photographer for such publications as Time, National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) To Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022 and was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award.

In episode 202, Stacy discusses, among other things:

• Her ‘awful’ childhood
• Her interest in the grey areas
• Violence as catharsis
• Why she was dissatisfied with her early work…
• …and what she did about it
• How she ‘accidentally’ ended up living in her car for 3.5 years
• Blurring her professional and personal lives
• How she came to work in Appalachia
• The title of her book, As it Was Give(n) To Me
• The mythology of Daniel Boone
• Why she included self-portraits in the book
• Playing with stereotypes and representation in her images
• Her grant writing endeavours
• Her next project in Appalachia
• The challenges of editing the book
• The long term nature of her projects

Referenced:

• Harry Cottle
• The FSA
• Jack Woody

Website | Instagram

“The camera for me is a connector. It connects me to people. And I always knew that if I hadn’t been a photographer, especially an editorial photographer where you’re sent out to all these different places, that I would be a very unhealthy hermit and I would just wither away. (Which isn’t even logical, but that’s how I felt). So the camera is a lifeline for me.”

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