Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City

by Brenda Ann Kenneally

In the tradition of Dorothea Lange and Robert Frank, an eye-opening portrait of the rise and fall of the American working class, and a shockingly intimate visual history of Troy, New York that arcs over five hundred years—from Henry Hudson to the industrial revolution to a group of contemporary young women as they grow, survive, and love.Welcome to Troy, New York. The land where mastodon roamed, the Mohicans lived, and the Dutch settled in the seventeenth century. Troy grew from a small trading post into a jewel of the Industrial Revolution. Horseshoes, rail ties, and detachable shirt collars were made there and the middle class boomed, making Troy the fourth wealthiest city per capita in the country. Then, the factories closed, the middle class disappeared, and the downtown fell into disrepair. Troy is the home of Uncle Sam, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the Rensselaer County Jail, the photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally, and the small group of young women, their children, lovers, and families who Kenneally has been photographing for over a decade. Before Kenneally left Troy, her life looked a lot like the lives of these girls. With passion and profound empathy she has chronicled three generations—their love and heartbreak; their births and deaths; their struggles with poverty, with education, and with each other; and their joy. Brenda Ann Kenneally is the Dorothea Lange of our time—her work a bridge between the people she photographs, history, and us. What began as a brief assignment for The New York Times Magazine became an eye-opening portrait of the rise and fall of the American working class, and a shockingly intimate visual history of Troy that arcs over five hundred years. Kenneally beautifully layers archival images with her own photographs and collages to depict the transformations of this quintessentially American city. The result is a profound, powerful, and intimate look at America, at poverty, at the shrinking middle class, and of people as they grow, survive, and love.

Genres: Nonfiction, Photography, Art, History, Graphic Novels

432 pages, Kindle Edition

Published August 28, 2018

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

I found this book absolutely fascinating, both for the compelling photos and for the intertwining history and modern narratives. Without any personal relevance, the book is amazing—but for me, the fact that I grew up in Troy made it all the more mind-blowing. Many readers have talked about Kenneally’s “industrial hometown”—and it certainly is, but there is more to the story.

The recent renaissance that Troy is experiencing (downtown, influx of gastropubs and farm-to-table, etc) is only one example of the division and inequality of Troy. The other is the split created by education and socioeconomics that has been there far longer than the 2000s. Troy is home to Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, a top engineering school. The community surrounding RPI has introduced an international population as well as a highly educated one, in contrast to the blue collar, down at the heels segment that this book highlights. Children of these vastly different backgrounds attend the middle school and high school, and likely have no idea of what the experience of the other is like.

I certainly had no idea when I attended Troy City schools in the late 80s/early 90s (basically between Kenneally’s time and the time captured in this book). This book is filled with locations that are familiar to me and at the same time with a whole world and experience that I never knew existed. I feel very naive and privileged reading it, and wonder how my experience of high school might have been different if I had been more aware. I can see how contained the bubble in which I operated really was.

I’m grateful to Kenneally for this incredible work and how eye opening it is.

[Eliza Whalen · Rating 4 out of 5]

LOVEEE love this book. maybe ive just been extra emotional lately but i rarely cry at books and this one made me tear up on multiple occasions

i have wanted to read this for the longest time, but never had access to a library that carried it (price started at $72 for a used copy last time i checked). thankfully i remembered that part of my job is literally checking out books from other libraries to people a few weeks ago and received my copy from uvm a few days after my epiphany B) god bless interlibrary loan. and this book

im usually not drawn to photo books, but the 518 focus caught my eye, and kept me engaged

there are some incredibly precious moments in this book. one that stuck with me was elliotts story of falling in love with dana from the picture of her taking an iron to her hair, such a sweet moment that grows into something so complicated in the rest of the book. i was also moved by the images of billie jean at her mothers cremation, the sadness and comedy was so devastating and real. there are a lot of other moments like these sprinkled throughout the book, but these resonated with me

this was an insane undertaking by kenneally, years of commitment to documentation through incarceration, fights, tantrums, deaths, pregnancies, everything. her love for the people whose lives she records is evident from the start and grows along with them. her personal history in troy is definitely helpful, these are not stories that couldve been told by an outsider.

an intense, moving look at how cycles of poverty and love self-perpetuate, how chosen families are created, and the vitalness of communal care. enough to piss anyone off about all the ways socio economic disparity can ruin lives. i think the number of canada goose jackets to walk by me while i read this at tisch was enough to cover one of these family's expenses for a year. the inclusion of troys gentrification at the end was very effective. also loved the history of the city sprinkled throughout.

it was cool to feel the geographic closeness of these stories. places i recognize, stewarts logos on every food item, etc. part of me selfishly wished this took place across the river in albany because the familiarity brought me a lot of joy, but then the story would be different, and i really appreciate it as-is. can an albany native take on a similar monumental project pls and thank u :D

my few complaints:
- some photos were difficult to appreciate because the division down the middle made them difficult to see
- some historic tangents did not feel entirely integrated into the individual stories (and i really liked when they were)
- it could be difficult to keep track of names/faces at times, not sure how this could be remedied though

"When we were kids, we avoided the disappointment of wanting the things we knew we couldn't have by learning to fall in love with what we could. We grew up loyal to things that fed us. We fell in love with what was immediate, physical, and satisfying--our food, our music, our highs, and each other."

[Christie Pratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I work and have lived in Troy. I work down the street from where these families live. I have crossed paths with them and know people who know them. I have been following their story ever since a friend came across the photo essay that won a contest and recognized some of the people in the presentation. It gave me more understanding of their worlds, lives, and paths they have taken in life. It helps me to give the people I support in my work the best I can. I think it is an incredibly important book to understand the socioeconomic issues we have in this state and country. In addition it is written by someone who has lived their lives, someone the families trust and who respects them and has been following them for years. I recommend buying the book. It is something that you really should experience and not just read it.

[Dragonfriend · Rating 3 out of 5]

I want to give it 3.5 stars, I think. I appreciated this book a lot because it did a lot of truth telling. A lot of Americans try to ignore the reality of most American's lives, even when it's their own lives. I know multiple people who grew up on food stamps and then relied on aid programs themselves when they first got kids of their own, but then despite that, will now go on and on about how "entitlement programs" should be cut and people should pull themselves up with their own bootstraps, blah blah blah... but the reality is that the problem is systemic. The legal and economic systems in America and the prejudices, lack of empathy, and lack of resources that people deal with everyday are creating a sink hole that families cannot escape. It's true that the personal choices people make make their lives worse, but they are in situations with limited choices to begin with, and the choices of impoverished people are usually judged much more harshly than the same choices when they are made by wealthier people. Some people are born with the cards stacked against them. I recognized a lot of people from my own life in these people's stories. I also felt a lot of the same frustrations reading their stories as I do with people I meet myself. The hopelessness in this neighborhood in Troy reminded me of the hopelessness I often sense in my own hometown. The reason I only gave it three stars though instead of five, is because I found the organization of this book strange. Perhaps because it was originally an exhibit that then was changed to a book format. I got that she was trying to make tie-ins and comparisons with the past, but to me, the way it was written felt haphazard and I feel like it could have been done in a way that was more clear and a little less all over the place.

[Gillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Growing up in the suburbs of Schenectady, NY, (which neighbors Troy), I couldn't wait to get my hands on this book. Growing up I remember bearing witness to the area's decline as more and more layoffs from GE occurred - I was curious to see an artist's rendering of the outcome/ aftermath and if it lined up with any of my recollections. That being said, it's been close to twenty years since I've so much as visited the area, so I also wondered if my memories would even be relevant. After an agonizing wait on my library's hold queue, upon finally being able to check it out, I ate "Upstate Girls" up. I love Ms. Kenneally's thorough and obsessive documentation and I was particularly moved by the care and love she clearly has for her "Girls." Her photography is comparible to Diane Arbus - there are definite references, but Ms. Kenneally draws you in, instead of pushing you out. I'd recommend this book to anyone as a companion to "Hillbilly Elegy," &/or "Educated," or as just a damn fine work of documentary art.

[Scott Tienken · Rating 5 out of 5]

open hearted, gloriously exhaustive and candid, gut-wrenching, packed with love, loyalty and devastation. a hardcore education for this privileged downstater about harder living, true family, addiction, incarceration, urban decay, institutionalized loss, so much. the guff i vaguely recall the author got for transgressing some journalistic line in her involvement in the lives of those she portrayed is instructively dumb

[Yasemin Dildar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book is quite saddening and even disturbing at times portraying how brutal poverty can get. To me the most shocking part was the spiral of mental illnesses, maybe genetically transmitted, but definitely behaviorally triggered by the conditions. I couldn't comprehend how early these children started dealing with complex mental disorders and all the medication they had to take.

[Robert · Rating 3 out of 5]

Pretty good documentary of my generation as they grow up in Troy, NY. An industrial town that has fallen on hard times. It's funny: I visited the town during the "Brooklyn years" as the downtown gentrified, but about a few miles north of where I was staying (right at the tail-end of the book) poverty and lack-of-upward-mobility was rife. The book/documentary even mentions this.

The "epilogue" of the book is the girls (most of whom are parents of 2-3 kids now) breaking up with the people they were with during the documentarians photographing of them, some of them were married and then divorced and got new loves. Others had another kid or two. Their kids growing up facing the same issues that they faced while growing up.

It's sobering. Troy, from the little I saw of it, is/was a nice town/city that has fallen on "hard times." It's clear that the richer-parts of the state (read: NYC) needs to properly invest in these towns (especially given Troy is 5-15 miles away from Albany, the states capital city) and not overly gentrify them so the towns residents don't get alienated and can try to better themselves/their lives in the town/city.

Highlights:

"IN 1922, HENRY FORD opened a plant across the river from Troy. So taken with the area, Ford commissioned Norman Rockwell to create a commemorative poster celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of his automobile in 1952. Rockwell used a 1903 scene set on Fourth Street in South Troy as the model for The Street Was Never the Same Again. But the advances in transportation that had fostered the growth of downtown Troy eventually led to its decline, with the development of the highway system as one of the major contributing factors in the shift from cities to suburbs."

"Troy’s preparations for its new downtown shopping mall came in the late 1960s when the funding for these redevelopment programs was drying up. After the demolition phase of the program had left a huge hole in the ground where downtown Troy used to be, interest waned, developers pulled out, and the city scrambled for help to rebuild. In 1979, the mall finally opened as the Uncle Sam Atrium Mall, with much less excitement than anticipated. The stores and movie theaters that had committed to lease space either backed out or operated only until a lack of foot traffic caused them to close. Today, the mall’s biggest retail tenant is a CVS Pharmacy."

Kenneally, Brenda Ann. Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City (p. 46-47). Regan Arts.. Kindle Edition.

(Sidenote: I looked at the Uncle Sam Atrium Mall just to make sure I had the location right [4th St, Troy, NY]. They're knocking down the Mall for... forgetting. But it's very sad knowing the location that I was in 5 years ago is being torn down knowing the history of it now. It's a shame, when I was there, outside of the noted CVS, there was state offices and unless the Union Street Farmer's Market was there during the winter, it was dead/empty most of the day outside of the CVS.)

"I was in Troy throughout the years that this new Brooklyn was being built just twenty blocks from the households that my cameras and I had become part of. Even though the Brooklyn fever that has characterized Troy’s revitalization has become a regular hook in local newspaper headlines, I was slow to realize how much was changing. My life in Troy was with the kids, I went where they went and their interests directed mine. Downtown for us meant a beeline to the food stamp, social security, or Medicaid offices, or a drive through en route to visit someone in RCJ at the other end of town. We never stopped off for lattes made with coffee from sustainable rain forests or visited the wine bar, and we had not acquired a taste for kohlrabi ragout.

Though we might have liked some of these things, the young pack I traveled with had a clear sense of where they did and did not belong. They were hardwired to recognize boundaries. Money was a major factor—farm-to-table simplicity is expensive amid a world of cheap, processed convenience. They dismissed spots in the new Troy as places where 'the white people go.' Though most of the kids and their families are white, everyone knew what this meant—these were places where the wealthy or middle-class shopped and dined, not themselves. By necessity, the kids had a different relationship to leisure, but no one felt what was on offer would be missed anyway. When we did stray from our normal haunts, we were often met with a polite reserve that the kids immediately determined as stuck-up or judgmental, inciting anger and reason to never deviate again.

[...]

But the concepts of regional identity and branding that are central to the expansion of the creative economy, and the class of workers that power it, remain at odds with Troy’s economic reality. While the national average for people living in poverty in 2016 was 14.7 percent, Troy still had 26.1 percent of its residents living below the poverty line, the largest group being females ages eighteen to twenty-four. A 2014 publication by The Region’s Center for Urban Growth and The Alliance for the Creative Economy list these socio-economic divides as key challenges. Revitalization stimulated by the creative economy has been largely concentrated in the Capital Region’s urban centers, while deep pockets of poverty persist just blocks away. Compared with similar-sized metropolitan regions, the Capital Region had the second highest concentration of creative jobs, but the most common jobs in Troy were in the healthcare and social assistance industries.

In Rensselaer County, income inequality was more than ten times that of the average worker in the bottom 1 percent: $415,981 to $38,843. None of the kids who shared their lives in these pages has patronized any of the thirty-five plus new downtown businesses that the mayor boasted about in a 2015 Troy Record article. Some destinations, like the Department of Social Services, that might have forced the kids to intersect with a reinvented urban center, have, as in the days of Troy’s Victorian grandeur, been shifted back to the working-class areas north of the Collar City Bridge."

Kenneally, Brenda Ann. Upstate Girls: Unraveling Collar City (p. 339). Regan Arts.. Kindle Edition.
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Unfortunately, the Kindle version (on a 1080p Windows PC) is really bad as a conversion. Parts of the book are cut off, 100% view is tiny (to where using "fit to Window" makes it readable but not possible to read the sections unless you highlight and scroll down). That knocked a star off.

Otherwise it's a great book that is a "love-letter" (in a way) to a town with a rich history that unfortunately is failing some of the resident's of "the Birthplace of Uncle Sam."

It's worth reading/flipping through for the history lesson(s) of the families she documented the town itself.

[Nancy · Rating 5 out of 5]

After seeing some pictures from the author and photographer Brenda Ann Kenneally in The New Yorker, I tracked down this book, thinking it was strictly a photography book but it proved to be so much more. For a dozen years, Kenneally immersed herself in the lives of a few interconnected and extended families in Troy, NY, and chronicled their messy lives. She was given unfettered access to their lives and shared photographs she took of them in addition to documents, scrapbook memorabilia and historical archives. Not only did she tell the story of these families she painted a picture of the city of Troy from when it was settled hundreds of years ago to today (2017). You will need to check your judgments of how they live, for poverty and generations of trauma aren't easily thrown off. Kenneally, herself a native of Troy, has created a fascinating time capsule for a certain group of urban underprivileged youth, the obstacles they face, and the choices they make in light of their surroundings. I found myself caring for these young women and their children and I wonder how they are faring now. Very thought-provoking and highly recommended.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

I learned more than I expected to about upstate poverty with this book. I now understand my family better. It was good to be reminded of the mental health and societal issues they face that make it so hard to improve their situation. It would be hard for anyone, even a person of privilege, to get out of the cycle they find themselves in. I appreciate the opportunity to peek into their lives. That was generous of them. I find that I think about them randomly throughout the weeks. I got this book from the library so I am donating the cost of the book to their fund, www.alittlecreativeclass.org.

[Lynne C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Upstate Girls blew me away. I cannot stress enough the importance of this book in our current era of crisis—Kenneally lays bare how the endless destructive cycles in our economic, social, education, and healthcare systems are all interrelated through the stories of these families in Troy, NY. Her text is as incisive as her photographs and other artwork is revealing. Truly a unique (and stunning) book and I highly recommend it, especially to anyone who reads books along the lines of Hillbilly Elegy.

[Jane · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I first delved into this book full of photographs of the marginalized women, I was upset and unable to shake off the feeling of despair over the shattered, almost hopeless lives of these young teen-agers and their offspring. On second, more careful reading, I understood how their lives happened, I read the letters and diary entries, and realized how our society has failed them. Kenneally's is a powerful, disturbing book, but contains a story that should send its readers into action for social reform.

[Bec · Rating 5 out of 5]

A haunting look at the city of Troy and the impact of poverty and mental illness on a group of friends and family living there.

This is a truly personal take on what is happening in some cities in the USA with its decline of major manufacturing. The photographic art really cuts through, Kenneally’s artistry is amazing.

[S · Rating 5 out of 5]

Documentary photography and companion story weaving together the lives of a contemporary extended family in Troy, NY and the history of the city. I loved this book so much. Along with photos, the story is told in court and school records, art and letters. An examination of class, gender, family, health, and America in what was for me a somewhat familiar setting. Worth a look.

[Debbie Armbruster · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely stunning!

[Pearse Anderson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the most amazing photobooks I have read. The design, closeness, and photo quality is just absolutely astounding. I need to form words. 10/10, wow.

[Kathryn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Skimmed parts of this but interesting look at poverty and history in Troy ny.

[Michelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

raw, intimate, gritty, compelling, compassionate, beautiful