Brenda Ann Kenneally’s photo essay, “Upstate Girls,” documents the coming of age of five troubled young women in Troy, N.Y. It is a decidedly unromantic view of poverty, dysfunction and teen pregnancy.
Sitting in her home in Brooklyn recently, Ms. Kenneally remembered one particular girl from Troy. This girl was in and out of the juvenile court system. She was involved with a much older boy at 12, became pregnant at 14, had an abortion, was immersed in drugs, and spent a year living in a group home. The odds were stacked against this teenager ever getting out of the cycle of poverty and despair that haunted her neighborhood. But she did.
The girl was Brenda Ann Kenneally.
Her mother and her father — whom she identified as a mentally ill alcoholic — divorced when she was 8. Her father moved in with another woman down the street. Her mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Little affection came her way. “I don’t care that we were poor,” Ms. Kenneally said, “but it would have just been nice if they loved us.”
“Most of the people who I knew were drug addicts and criminals, or they were needy relatives,” she said. “I kept fighting with my family, my brother, and every time I did my mother would call the cops. I was facing a year in prison. I remember the detective, Detective Lynch, said: ‘You have to get away from your family. They’re going to get you in trouble.’”
She felt trapped, but her “terminal rebelliousness” and hippie ways helped her aspire to something more. She had to leave Troy.
She hitchhiked away at 16 and, for many years, never looked back.
“I got to Miami and then came a 20-year exile where I found photography and didn’t die,” Ms. Kenneally said. She believes this is why she didn’t end up like the girls she is now documenting.
In Florida, she struggled with alcoholism and drugs, and worked as a waitress, a store clerk and as a bartender in a strip club. She was married and divorced twice before becoming sober in 1986.
After sobering up, Ms. Kenneally resumed her education, studying photojournalism and sociology at the University of Miami. She was also a freelance photographer for The Miami Herald. While traveling with a carnival, she became pregnant with her son Simon (now 15), married again, moved to New York City and divorced again.
She raised Simon on the edge of Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick and documented her neighbors and their struggle with poverty and the illicit drug trade. Those photographs were published in “Money Power Respect” (Channel Photographics, 2005) and can be found on the Raw File site, produced by Laura Lo Forti.
While photography has changed her life, it hasn’t made her financially stable. She has made very little money on her documentary projects, rarely gets magazine assignments and has been on food stamps more often than not.
By chance, she returned to Troy in 2002 on assignment for The New York Times Magazine to photograph “Prison Is a Member of Their Family,” by Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. Ms. Kenneally stayed in touch with one of her subjects, whose friend’s story — “reminding me of me” — began Ms. Kenneally’s photo essay, “Upstate Girls,” a project that continues.
The searing photographs in “Upstate Girls” have brought her prestigious awards, including a Canon Female Photojournalist Award, a Getty Images Grant for Editorial Photography and first prize for stories about daily life, from World Press Photo.
Not content simply to photograph her subjects’ tattered lives, Ms. Kenneally is trying to help girls who have run afoul of the legal system, as she did. She is working on a graphic novel that will include her photographs, and she has started workshops in which girls make scrapbooks to help them think about their lives and choices they can make.
With the filmaker MacGregor Thomson, Ms. Kenneally is editing a series of minidocumentaries on the girls. She has also relaunched her Web site, Upstate Girls, designed by Murray Cox and produced by Steven Zeswitz. She is trying to raise money for these projects while also studying for a Ph.D. in electronic media at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
While Ms. Kenneally hopes to help teenage girls in trouble, she has few illusions.
“I think breaking away is damn near impossible,” she said. “It’s the hardest thing I ever did.”
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