poverty

Youth Media Sanctuary (YMS) is a community media arts peer-training project, designed to teach multimedia skills to young people in North Troy, NY, and to help develop urgently needed independent local voices in our economically devastated neighborhood. 

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Check out blog for updpates on the latest workshops, including photos, curriculum, reflections, and even snack recipes!

"Upstate Girls" from throughout the Capital Region share stories about the challenges in their lives, gathering with representatives of the institutions with which they are entwined—including the legal, educational, healthcare and penal systems—in response to award-winning photojournalist Brenda Ann Kenneally’s compelling work.

The Sanctuary will host a one day workshop to facilitate a dialogue between girls from the UPSTATE GIRLS exhibition, other young women growing up in the Capital Region, and the many agencies that can influence their efforts to break the cycle of post-industrial marginalization.

The day will begin with a tour of Brenda Ann Kenneally’s award winning photographs and responses to the work. We will continue with a scrapbook workshop facilitated by young women from the neighborhood, presentations by local change makers and breakout stations. The day will conclude with a final discussion with all participants.

‘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.