underground gallery

At a time when hard-core, investigative journalism is in peril, the Sanctuary's Underground Gallery presents "Media Nodes," a view behind the curtain, beyond the front page, to the interior landscape of a news industry in transition.

Award-winning photographer Sean Hemmerle, in collaboration with the Columbia Journalism Review, took his camera into newsrooms around the country.  "People throw around this word all the time, mostly disparangingly: 'oh, the media,' and 'media spin," he says.  "That made me think: who is the media?  And what about the media?  I wanted to put a face on these media nodes, the places where news is 'made.'"

10/16/11 - 12/3/11; Mon, Tue, (closed Wed), Thu, Fri, 11 AM-1 PM; an hour before, during and an hour after events; plus by appointment.

BIO

"Media Nodes" series visually articulates the transforming activities and environments of our news media at a time when hard-core, investigative journalism is in peril. 

‘Upstate Girl’ finds voice in photography

By Bob Goepfert The Record

Brenda Ann Kenneally has an addictive personality. That addiction has produced "Upstate Girls: What Became of the Collar City," which opens Saturday at the Sanctuary for Independent Media, 3361 Sixth Ave. in Lansingburgh. It is a photographic study of six young women living in North Troy. The images are stark, real and disturbing as they chronicle the lives of the powerless and disenfranchised. Though fraught with social, political and economic implications, the images are visually hypnotizing as they capture the lives of innocence lost.

Kenneally refers to herself as New York Times Magazine’s "photographer of choice when it comes to capturing images of kids living in poverty." Her first assignment for the magazine was in 2003 when she was asked to supply pictures for a series written by her friend Adrian Nicole Leblanc titled "Random Family." It was a work about neglected, unsupervised kids living on the streets of New York City. Her work was so successful, in 2006, the Times sent her to New Orleans to portray the plight of displaced children trying to survive after Katrina. An entire issue of the New York Times Magazine was devoted to that work.

Exhibit looks at women in poverty
By Sara Foss

TROY — A young woman named Dana Aftab wanders through a cramped hallway, gazing at blank white walls that will soon be covered with pictures. Dozens of photographs lie on the floor.

“Brenda, how can I help you?” Aftab asks.

Without hesitation, Brenda Ann Kenneally replies, “Hang up your photos.”

“Is there any specific order you want?” Aftab asks.

“However you want,” Kenneally tells her. “It’s your life.”

Aftab takes a plastic sleeve filled with photographs and begins tacking them to the wall. An Albany native who now lives in Brooklyn, Kenneally has spent the past five years photographing Aftab, her sisters and mother and other women who live in Troy. She has taken hundreds of pictures of birthday parties and births and homecomings from prison.

“Upstate Girls,” an exhibit featuring many of these photographs, will open Saturday in the Troy-based Sanctuary for Independent Media’s Underground Gallery; an opening reception will be held at 6 p.m. on Feb. 21.