In 2014, Slate published ten photographs from a work in progress by the artist Brenda Ann Kenneally, documenting the lives of a group of twenty-first-century American teen-agers in Troy, a city in upstate New York. The subjects in her images were not doing much: in one, an obese teen-age boy lay on a mattress in a homeless shelter, disconsolate; an exhausted child at a kitchen table waited for his bottle to be filled with coffee, his favorite drink; a young woman named Kayla, one of Kenneally’s central subjects, smoked a cigarette as she held her baby son.
Some of Slate’s readers responded to these scenes with expressions of anger and disgust—they indicted the choices of the people depicted and accused Kenneally of exploiting them. Usually, people living in poverty are newsworthy only when their actions are criminal—meriting a few lines in a police blotter—but now it seemed that living was an offense in itself. The debate surrounding the work became the story, reducing the photographs with obfuscating commentary, like grime. The images had been in the public domain for years by then, but never in a way that could be so easily and thoughtlessly consumed. The attacks on Kayla’s parenting became so malignant that Kenneally asked that the photograph of her be removed.
Kenneally was born in Albany, but she left the area when she was a teen-ager and didn’t return for many years. In 2002, she and I worked together on a magazine assignment that brought us to Troy. She had recently finished a book that she’d been working on for ten years, about a community in Brooklyn. I had completed my own ten-year project, about an extended family from a poor section of the Bronx. Our upstate assignment, for the Times Magazine, stemmed from that work. Kenneally met Kayla on our first trip; after that, she couldn’t stop going back.
[For more on this story by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, go to https://www.newyorker.com/cult...l-small-city-america]
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