Stacy Kranitz: Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down

Centering around Stacy Kranitz’s decades-long investigation into Appalachian culture and photographic representation, Kranitz will be joined in conversation by essayist Mesha Maren and curator Laura Hutson Hunter. Covering the history of photography through Appalachian imagery and how the War on Poverty affected the region, Kranitz, Maren, and Hutson Hunter explore the civil contract between the photographer and the photographed, and more.

About the Book: 

Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down traces the complex social history of Appalachia while questioning the role photography has played in shaping how the region and its people have been seen across generations.

The Appalachian region of the United States has historically been subjected to numerous political, religious and media interventions that have perpetuated a negative image. Through historical archives and contemporary images, Kranitz examines the evolving representation of Appalachia, from narratives of poverty and cultural deficiency to the lasting consequences of industrial extraction.

At the centre of the book is Pat Greene, whom Kranitz met in 2013 and whose life became a recurring thread through the work, connecting an intimate personal story to broader histories from the region, including the voices of Harry Caudill and JD Vance, two influential figures whose accounts of Appalachia have placed responsibility for the region’s deprivation on its own people, drawing on narratives of cultural and, at times, biological deficiency that echo a longer eugenicist history.

Drawing together seventeen years of photographs, archival research and literary texts, the book considers the camera as witness, propaganda, instrument of power and, at times, a means of redemption.

About the Speakers 

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 on the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee. She has received a Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work. Solo exhibitions of her photographs have been presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move in Cortona, Italy, and the Tennessee Triennial in Chattanooga, TN. Her photographs are in several public collections, including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke University, Archive of Documentary Arts. She works on assignment for publications including Time, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, ProPublica and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022. It was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture First Photobook Award. Her next monograph, Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, will be published in 2026 with funding from an Images Vevey Book Award. She is a 2026 / 27 Nieman Fellow at Harvard University.

Mesha Maren is the author of the novels Sugar Run, Perpetual West, and Shae. Her short stories and essays can be read in Tin House, The Oxford American, The Guardian, The New York Times, Crazyhorse, Triquarterly, The Southern Review, Ecotone, Sou’wester and elsewhere. She is currently an associate professor of the practice of English at Duke University. Her essay, “A Certain Sense of Doubt” appears in the photobook Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down.

Laura Hutson Hunter is a writer, editor, and curator based in Nashville. She is the arts editor of the Nashville Scene, and she co-edited the Frist Art Museum’s catalogue In Her Place: Nashville Artists in the Twenty-First Century, published by Vanderbilt University Press. She is currently pursuing a certificate in Curatorial Practices in Photography through the International Center of Photography. She curated the exhibition Stacy Kranitz: Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down, on view through December 15 at NYU’s Gallatin Galleries 

Header Image Stacy Kranitz