Ain't No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down: A Lecture/Performance by Stacy Kranitz

Documentary photographer Stacy Kranitz will take us on a journey through photographic representation of the Appalachian Mountaineer across time to explore how poverty is depicted through the lens as witness, propaganda, oppressor and redemption. This special program is hosted by 2nd Story in conjunction with Elijah Howe's exhibition, CHAINED ROCK.

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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.

Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a recent Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include a George Polk Award and a Center for Documentation Fellowship. She has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France and the Tennessee Triennial. 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. She works as an assignment photographer for publications including Time, the New York Times, Vanity Fair and ProPublica. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022.