I recently met Brenda Ann Kenneally and listened to her talk on the final night of Fotopub in Slovenia. Her output of work over the last seven years with The Raw File and Upstate Girls is epic and the comprehensive way in which she works across many mediums reflects her deep commitment to telling the stories of the women she documents. The multimedia pieces she has produced provide an entry in to a larger and much more complex story. Her work will stay with me for a long time.

“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 it is those that are recently without money rather than Americans whose ongoing struggles left them un-phased by the headlines.

My project has followed seven women for five years as their escape routes out of generational poverty have lead to further entrapments. I am looking to compile a gererational history of the emotional spiral of those resigned to the lower class in The United States.”

As part of her lecture she showed a short piece of multimedia with audio from Heather (one of the women in Upstate Girls), and a collection of family photographs, text and other material pasted into the pages of a book. Heather is recorded talking through the scrapbook she has made and tells the story of her life so far. I found the piece very moving and Brenda has kindly allowed me to share it here.

Brenda describes the process of making the scrapbooks as a way for the women to create “their own visual record via gathering photographs and ephemera and writing passages to bear witness to their own past and validate the culture that has been created by our contemporary social policies”