Life as Art | A conversation with photographer Stacy Kranitz

“The line between art and life should be kept as fluid, and perhaps indistinct, as possible".
-Allan Kaprow

This interview was conducted on December 20th, 2020 via Zoom.

Stacy Kranitz was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. By acknowledging the limits of photographic representation, she makes images that create an expanded sense of authorship and accountability in which all parties (including the viewer) are complicit in the representational act as a false and yet, ultimately, satisfying and seductive construct. 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 to more forcefully convey the complexity and instability of the lives, places, and moments they depict. In this way, her work acknowledges the failure of representation to ever be able to communicate the other.

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. Portfolios of her photographs have been featured in Granta, GUP, Harper’s, Hotshoe, the Intercept, Mother Jones, Oxford American, Photofile, Sewanee Review, Vice and the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Kranitz is a current Guggenheim Fellow (2020). Additional awards include Time Magazine Instagram Photographer of the Year (2015), the Michael P. Smith Fund for Documentary Photography Award (2017), and a We, Women grant (2020). Her work was shortlisted for the Louis Roederer Discovery Award (2019), and she has presented solo exhibitions of her photographs at the Diffusion Festival of Photography in Cardiff, Wales (2015) and the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France (2019). Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, will be published by Twin Palms.