Back in June 2016, we featured the works of photography Stacy Kranitz, a documentarian who blurs the line between personal and outsider looking in. Since 2009, Kranitz has been documenting the Appalachian region of America, on the doorstep of the eastern seaboard and the deep history between North and South in the USA. Tracey Morgan Gallery is pleased to present As it Was Give(n) to Me, an exhibition of photographs and ephemera by Kranitz. This is Kranitz’s second exhibition with the gallery.

From the gallery: Beginning in the 19th Century, the Appalachian region was devastated by the coal industry which took valuable resources from the land, leaving the inhabitants of the region impover-ished. In the 1960s, the War on Poverty was declared, with the government announcing it would put an end to poverty in America and Appalachia was the epicenter. Krantiz states “Pho-tographers descended on Appalachia to make images that would help unite Americans around the effort to improve the lives of a destitute and struggling people. Instead, the photographers offered a simplistic and superficial image of poverty that has haunted the Appalachian people ever since.”

Kranitz began work on this series in 2009. While there, she became aware of the problematic role of photography in this region. “I began by reckoning with the fact that I had come to Appalachia with a fantasy of what I wanted it to be. I realized this fantasy contested my desire to provide an objective portrayal because objectivity in documentary photography is its own kind of fantasy. My work in Appalachia is about the tension between these two desires.”