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.Stacy was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She is a 2020 Guggenheim Fellow. Additional awards include the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography (2017), a Southern Documentary Fund Research and Development grant (2020), a Puffin Foundation grant (2022), and a Center for Documentation Fellowship (2023). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019). She has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015), the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move festival in Cortona, Italy (2022) and the Tennessee Triennial (2023) 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. Stacy works as an assignment photographer for such publications as Time, National Geographic, the New York Times, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) To Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022 and was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award. In episode 202, Stacy discusses, among other things:Her ‘awful’ childhoodHer interest in the grey areasViolence as catharsisWhy she was dissatisfied with her early work……and what she did about itHow she ‘accidentally’ ended up living in her car for 3.5 yearsBlurring her professional and personal livesHow she came to work in AppalachiaThe title of her book, As it Was Give(n) To MeThe mythology of Daniel BooneWhy she included self-portraits in the bookPlaying with stereotypes and representation in her imagesHer grant writing endeavoursHer next project in AppalachiaThe challenges of editing the bookThe long term nature of her projects Referenced:Harry CottleThe FSAJack Woody Website | Instagram“The camera for me is a connector. It connects me to people. And I always knew that if I hadn’t been a photographer, especially an editorial photographer where you’re sent out to all these different places, that I would be a very unhealthy hermit and I would just wither away. (Which isn’t even logical, but that’s how I felt). So the camera is a lifeline for me.”