Stacy Kranitz

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. Her work has been written about in the Columbia Journalism Review, British Journal of Photography, Journal of Appalachian Studies, Time, The Guardian, Juxtapoz and Liberation.

In 2015 she was named Time Magazine Instagram Photographer of the Year and in 2017 received a grant from the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography. In 2019 she was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award and presented an exhibition of her work at the Rencontres d’Arles. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, will be published by Twin Palms.

Photo Credit: Benjy Russell