Stacy Kranitz was on her way to Paris when we spoke. “I’m never going anywhere glamorous,” she told me — this was an anomaly. I could hear her placing her suitcase in a luggage compartment as flight safety announcements muffled in the background. Stacy was on her way to teach a workshop in France, but as she said herself, most of her photography focuses on the beauty and complexity in the decidedly unglamorous.
Stacy grew up in Frankfort, Kentucky, and now lives in the Appalachian foothills of eastern Tennessee. Though she’s lived in the region for nearly a decade and photographed there for even longer, she pushes back on the idea that she gains some sort of specific credibility from insider status. “Ideally, my work can tell these stories in a way that’s both inside and outside. I want to undo these ideas of insider and outsider. In a way, I am an outsider. I was born only a few counties away from what’s considered Appalachia, but does that give me the right to tell these stories? I actually don’t think that it does. People assume I’m Appalachian because I now live there. I find that conversation around identity to be … well, I almost wonder if we’re asking the right questions. We need both insiders and outsiders.”
Some of Stacy’s most famous projects are As It Was Give(n) to Me, a photographic study of Appalachian life, and Study of Post-Pubescent Manhood, images from “a dystopian compound in Ohio” that notably are not only of men. Stacy has also photographed Louisiana’s Cancer Alley region in Fulcrum of Malice, and the underground world of cockfighting in The Louisiana Cockfighter’s Manual. She has a knack for picking up on how violence, sexual deviance and fear are part of the fabric of American life.
One of my favorites from Study of Post-Pubescent Manhood is a photo of a woman sitting in a white plastic chair with a pack of Marlboros tucked into one breast of her bikini top and a phone in the other, dirt underneath her nails and a rhinestone in her navel. The depiction of people smoking in Stacy’s photography is a fascinating through-line. One image in As It Was Give(n) to Me shows a woman taking a drag from a fresh cigarette with another half-finished in her other hand, as she sits beside her husband in a car facing out of the open door. The woman wears gorgeous wedge sandals and an orange sundress. Stacy’s sensitivity with her subjects allows for their self-expression through their fashion choices and body language.
As It Was Give(n) to Me is not moralistic or voyeuristic — if anything, it resists gawking, because it’s both hard to look away from and at times confusing, making the spaces depicted feel both familiar and strange. In the accompanying statement Stacy writes: “Rather than reinforcing conventional views of Appalachia as a poverty-ridden region, or by selectively dwelling on positive aspects of the place and its people to offset problematic stereotypes, this work insists that each of these options are equally problematic ways of looking at place.”


But people don’t always respond kindly to that. Stacy’s work is some of the most provocative documentary photography out there, often asking viewers to examine the line between stereotype and reality. “I’ve gotten some pushback, particularly from people in the nonprofit world,” Stacy said. “When I first started making the work, people said really cruel things about me. They called me a drug addict and a slut and tried to ridicule the work I was doing.” The personal nature of such attacks demonstrates the gender bias she often narrativizes in her photos. Despite that, she’s able to shrug them off: “My work is contentious. I make things to start conversations.”
As It Was Give(n) to Me originally debuted in 2015, what feels like a lifetime ago in America’s socio-political landscape. “I do think since I started photographing in Appalachia, there’s a lot more sensitive coverage of the region. That doesn’t mean that people like cameras, though,” she said. She noted that coal production is up a little bit in Appalachia, and she now sees coal trucks and coal trains in areas that used to be vacant. Discussions around the opioid epidemic are more public than they used to be. “The kind of feature reporting I’m interested in is work that’s done with a lot of sensitivity,” she said.


“The book I made [based on As It Was Given(n) to Me] was really an overview of my work, more of a survey, and the next projects are kind of like rabbit holes down very specific narratives and very specific stories about the region,” she told me. The main project she’s currently working on depicts the resurgence of black lung in coal-mining communities in Tennessee.
“We have some new legislation going into effect to limit miners’ exposure to silica dust, but unfortunately, that’s not going to stave off the current numbers,” she said. The federal law forcing employers to test the air quality and adjust working conditions came into effect in April of 2024 under the Biden administration.
For this project, Stacy spent time at federally funded clinics where people can get tested for black lung, but many in mining communities are reluctant to get tested. “They’re in an uphill battle to get people to want to get tested regularly. It’s a pretty miserable test, so I get why people aren’t excited to go do it,” Stacy said. “One of the things that I also think makes people feel so vulnerable is that there’s still a lot of paranoia around getting black lung disability,” she noted.


The documentary photography she does is vulnerable work for both the photographer and the subject. She doesn’t see her work as trying to summarize a place or preach about right and wrong or good and evil. Part of what gives them their gravitas is that she doesn’t hold onto an insider identity to claim a narrative, or wax poetic about being an outsider. Stacy stands her ground while still allowing the work to speak for itself. Maybe it upsets you, disturbs you or disgusts you. But the human experience itself can be upsetting, disturbing and disgusting, and still beautiful and complex — as dramatic as the idea of Paris or as ordinary as the humdrum of going to the airport. Stacy’s work is timelier than ever, and the world needs artists like her to allow us to sit with contradiction.
All images shot by Stacy Kranitz across the Appalachian region as part of her 12-year-long project,”As It Was Give(n) to Me“