Before “Women of Troy,” there was “Upstate Girls.” How did “Upstate Girls” get started?

I had been working on a long-term project in my neighborhood called “Money Power Respect,” documenting several families. When the project was excerpted in The New York Times Magazine, they got a writer who also worked in that immersion-style reporting, Adrian Nicole LeBlanc. She’s really terrific. We worked on that together and became very dear friends.

photo courtesy of Brenda Ann Kenneally

So when the Times excerpted Random Family in conjunction with its publication, none of the people in the book—although they had been written about extensively—had ever been photographed, and they called me to do it.

I knew about the story, I had read pieces of Random Family, but mostly my connection with Adrian was that we became friends. So I hadn’t read the manuscript in its entirety, and I didn’t realize that the family she followed had moved to Troy.

My father lived around the corner from there. When I left upstate New York—well, I left several times— I had a lot of involvement with the juvenile justice system, and I became an emancipated minor. I hadn’t gone back much.

After I photographed the family for the Times, the book came out, and Adrian moved on. Later, the oldest girl in Random Family called me and said, “One of the girls you met is my girlfriend, and we’re going to have a baby together. Would you like to photograph the birth? By the way, the baby’s father is my cousin, and he’s in jail, and his father is in jail. And so is her father—he’s been in prison her whole life—and so I’m going to step in and be the father.”

I had a conversation with Adrian, because it was her story. So we decided that I would do it, and maybe she would write about it later, maybe not. But that’s how it started. I photographed the birth and then really got to know the family of that girl that actually delivered the baby. That was the girl that made me think, “This was me if I didn’t hitchhike out of upstate New York.” I felt almost drawn back into my own childhood.

I think all the time about class, and so everything I look at has an eye to the unseen separation that we work so hard to keep in this country under the guise of being equal. And then of course, staying in Troy, I quickly got to know the young women from Random Family, and I really just followed the girls on this one block.

At what point did you get involved with Lu Olkowski and Ted Genoways, the creators of the multimedia poetry program “In Verse”?

Ted had seen my presentation of “Upstate Girls,” which is the work that this particular segment of “In Verse” was based on—work that was already done. Two summers ago at the Look Festival of Photojournalism, I presented a multimedia piece. Ted e-mailed me after and said, “I’d love to find a way to use this material.” I joked, “This is the project nobody wants, and those are the ones I never stop doing.” Ted said, “We think we could find a home for it in our magazine. We’d like to.” I was once again in foreclosure in my house, because that’s how I paid for the stuff, by refinancing. He paid me for it immediately.

The idea was  at first, that we would use Virginia Quarterly Review as a way to start fleshing out this graphic novel—that’s the way I’m preparing the book. A year passed, and we had many phone meetings, but he could not get a handle on how to present the number of photographs in VQR and be true to the spirit of what I was doing. Then I got a call from Lu Olkowski, saying she was writing this grant, and Ted suggested it as a way to finally get the photographs out.

Since you had already done that work, did you head back with them when they went to Troy?

There’s no way they could have done this without me. Imagine poetry as the distilling the facts and distilling until you get to the bone, or the very essence of the bone—the bone dust. To do that in the three weeks that Susan was there would have been impossible.

Susan is an amazing poet, and she could have written poetry, but she would not have been able to get to the bone. Imagine figuring out the history and the irony of the working class and what the working class has become in the United States based on what they were told hard work would get them. Based in a city like Troy, which revels in being the home of Uncle Sam, the birthplace of the first female labor union, to get to that would take a lot longer than three weeks. And then to actually get into the bedroom of some person to be able to write about them, think how long that would take.

I don’t mean to sound like a pompous asshole. It’s really just like great reporting—if you want to report deeply and well, time is the only answer. Working this way, it’s like I was the team that went in first and got it ready. But Troy’s very difficult. I’ve worked deep, deep inner city, and I have to say Troy is much more difficult to negotiate the interior of.

In what way?

In the inner city, with MTV and the whole rap phenomenon—it’s a whole bona fide culture, I don’t discount it at all. Cameras and stardom—people in the inner city are actually very savvy about those kinds of things, because white journalists and journalists in general have been using the inner city as a template forever, since the FSA at least. So they’re very savvy. In Troy, I don’t want to say they’re clannish, but there are a few old families and they all know each other.

Also it’s the idea of accepting art is probably another layer of restriction, the idea of understanding the value of art. The inner city, even at its grittiest, gets that more than the working class Catholic community. It doesn’t recognize art the same way.

Do you worry about having your life so bound up with your subjects’? Does it make it harder to have them as subjects in your photography?

I don’t feel a conflict of interest because I’m not doing this for anybody. I know that sounds like a really stupid answer, but I think history will care, and I’m doing it for history. If you’re deep into a family history, you can almost never stop. You almost owe it to them to check in and record where they’re at. Where are you going to leave these people stuck in history?

So I don’t feel a conflict. Anything from my past or who I am that’s tied up with who they are is just like research, like years I spent in the field. I understand perfectly that for single mothers, the law is like a parent, but it’s the bad, beat-your-ass parent, lock-you-in-your-room-for-the-rest-of-your-life parent.

I do feel a conflict in loyalty. Even when Susan and Lu came, I had to take a side, and the side is always on the side of the women. Oral storytelling is a big part of the culture there, and once I show up on so-and-so’s porch, it’s already out. I have to explain what I’m doing.

Most of the women I know there are very sensitive. Since their lives are interwoven, since there’s family feuding going on, if you’re at someone’s house, your social graces have to be razor sharp so you don’t offend anyone and keep access to everyone. That kind of stuff was really hard, because when there’s another person in the mix, some of the women would say, “Well, if you’re not visiting me today, then I can see Lu.”

Was it hard to let the poet, Susan Somers-Willett, and the producer, Lu Olkowski, in on these relationships that you’d built across the years?

I’ve worked with some journalists before, and that part is always hard, because it’s the struggle between doing the work and having something down for history. You need to care about getting the work out and disseminating it in meaningful and accessible and beautiful, intelligent ways. Which Susan and Lu wanted to do, too.

In one way, getting something on public radio, NPR, and Public Radio International as a journalist that has any kind of self-preservation, I should jump at that chance. But to me it felt like an extreme intrusion. I say that in a way, because it’s a metaphor for my own experience in those bedrooms and living rooms like the ones you see in the photographs from Troy. Wanting to stay there—even those women dream of going larger, but it’s comfortable in the place that they know.

I come from that stock, so the kind of ambition that may be instilled in other photographers and some of the people in my “profession,” even the kids my kid goes to school with, there’s a sense of ambition you have to have to get anywhere—I don’t mean Susan and Lu.

I don’t have that ambition, so it was incredibly hard. I kept shooting myself in the foot all the way, yet trying to remind myself, “You need to do this. Otherwise hanging out in Troy on a porch the rest of your life is a way of not doing anything.” The work I do is what has pulled me out of the life that I look at though my camera, and yet it is the same one that pulls me back into it though loyalty to it.

[Check out our commentary on "Women of Troy" and our talk with poet Susan B.A. Somers-Willett about her work on it. Or read interviews with radio producer Lu Olkowski about this unusual collaboration and Ted Genoways of the Virginia Quarterly Review on recapturing a documentary role for poetry.]

How did ”In Verse” come to be?

It’s really just a collaboration between poets and photographers and a radio producer—me—to report stories about the working poor. That was the initial idea. The project was conceived in November 2008, which was just about two months into our economic crisis. And there were a lot of stories at that point pulling apart questions like “What are credit default swaps?” And there were a lot of stories and worries about the super-wealthy not being wealthy anymore, and worries about the middle class slipping a notch. The group who created this project thought it was a good opportunity to look at the people getting less coverage—those further down the economic ladder, who’d already been in trouble before the collapse.

What has your role been in the project?

I created the project with Ted Genoways, the editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review. It came about because I was invited to apply for a grant, the Makers Quest 2.0. The grant itself, from the Association of Independents in Radio, was created to ask individual producers to come up with ideas to lead public radio into a realm of public media.

Everything is melding together—print people and television people. Radio people are often writing for print now in a way they weren’t before. All the media seemed to be getting combined online. They created the grant to give individuals an opportunity to explore, and I was one of eight producers given a grant. I had long loved VQR and had wanted to work with Ted. So when this grant came up, I called him up and said, “Let’s use this as an opportunity to do work together.” He and I had a series of conversations that led to “In Verse.”

He commissions poetry on a regular basis. This seemed like an opportunity to do something he was already doing and to do it a little more deliberately, using more than one medium. So Ted was just huge—he had been thinking about this for a long time. I was lucky enough to see that he had a special idea, and I knew how I could make it work.

Why poetry?

Poetry was in it from the beginning. Ted spoke in passing about wanting to have a corps of poet reporters. I’m not a poetry reader— but something about it made so much sense to me. I could see and hear how it could work, how nice it could be to hear news or things that we think of as news from a really difference perspective. I felt validated and wonderful when an Israeli newspaper gave and issue over to poets and fiction writers for a day. Poets wrote the weather and stock quotes, everything.

Were you thinking of other examples?

C.D. Wright’s book One Big Self, about the prison system in Louisiana. There was also LiveHopeLove from Kwame Dawes. So there is a tradition, which Kwame Dawes realized so beautifully.

It’s a very contemporary combination of audio, print, and images, yet the poems make reference to classic literature via the “Women of Troy” title.

My understanding is that in “The Trojan Women” play, the men go off to fight the war, and they’re killed. With the absence of the men, the women are left. And there is that odd similarity to the city of Troy, N.Y., where a large part of the male population is incarcerated. There is certainly a middle class and there are educated folks, but in this community of women, men are not part of the household and daily existence.

One reason I like this project is that poetry sticks with people. There’s a reason people still do it. It can reach into a psychological state of being in a way that a traditional journalist couldn’t get the time to do or wouldn’t do. It’s a story about generational poverty. There’s little change from generation to generation. In traditional journalism—I don’t know if it’s the expectation on the part of readers, listeners, editors or reporters—a lot of the reaction is “Why is this? How can we stop this?”

I think what a poet can do is to not ask why, but to see it, and record it, and present it. I think the poems are very true to Billie Jean and DJ. I spoke to them recently. It took a long time to get them the piece, because they had moved. About a week before Christmas, I was waiting to hear back from DJ. First she sent me a text: “I got it now. I’m crying.” And then I think she just sent, “OMG.O-M-G.”

I asked, “What does that mean?” I asked if it felt right. I was worried she wouldn’t come across tough enough. Or too tough. But she’s a really strong person. When I asked her if it felt right, she said, “Yes. I listened to it with the kids, and the only part they didn’t like was when you talked about the nits.” That was the complaint. I don’t really know why she cried—maybe she just thought of her grandma. But it touched her.

You said in a post on Transom.org that you imagined that “like Joe [Richman]’s diaries, these pieces would be narratives rooted in scenes.” Can you talk about how the pieces work as narrative nonfiction stories in each medium?

If you think about “Just a Girl,” there are scenes. There’s the parade [for Flag Day]. It’s really a holiday most of us don’t celebrate much anymore, but this was an epic parade, and she got all dolled up.

When Susan and I were out, we co-reported everything. We prepped together, we did the interview together, and we debriefed together. I don’t think that kind of true documentary work happens much anymore. You just follow people around and do what they’re doing and document their life. Which is not to say, “Hey, I want a scene in the New York Office of Temporary Assistance.” You say, “What are you going to do today?”

We spent just a tremendous amount of time with these women; Susan can tell you this. I think she was stunned by how much time we spent. For her, she would see some things and say, “I have enough,” but as a radio person, where not much is going on, I love it. I need to record that, too.

I think in that “Just a Girl” piece, you feel that you’re at the parade with her, because we were at the parade with her. The poem with DJ and her mom, we spent a lot of time at DJ’s home and her mom’s home, we spent a lot of time just being there—you can hear that. You hear her making dinner, making pork chops.

What has the response been so far?

People are liking it, loving it. Which is really, really gratifying. I think people want to see more. I want to do more. I’m speaking to two radio stations who are interested in doing installments in their communities. In that case, I’d work with Ted to find a poet—Ted’s been the one to cherry-pick and recommend the poets. That’s one of his jobs on this project.

This grant was a beautiful grant, but it was a modest grant. I was given $40,000 and required to use it over a five-month time period. Gulfport [the second installment of “In Verse”] and Troy both happened within a five-month period.

What did you change in doing the second installment?

Both kind of happened at the same time; there was great overlap. Troy started a little bit earlier, but they very much happened at the same time. With such a particular deadline, it is difficult to build a real relationship to get intimate tape and find subjects in a small window. When Ted and I were planning, we looked for collaborators to work with who already had made inroads into the communities.

I truly believe that Brenda [Kenneally] may be the best photographer in the world. She has an amazing talent. She can take a picture of a young man looking at a bag of Doritos. Something that is so simple, but it’s riveting. She can capture that kind of longing and secret wish. She really has the tenacity and the talent—a lot of her strongest work is framed simply. Like on the Huffington Post, they did an article, and there was one photograph Brenda gave to them. A baby in a car carrier set in front of the TV on the floor, and on the screen is SpongeBob. There’s not a lot happening, but it says a lot. She’s saying a lot with her choices. And it makes for great commentary on American life.

She had been shooting this group of women for the last six years. Ted had seen her work and wondered, “How do I peel off part of her giant project for use in a magazine?” We couldn’t have done it without her. We would not have had the immediate acceptance from all these women without it.

Natasha [Trethewey] is from Gulfport, Miss. She wanted to go to Gulfport. She had written about Katrina. We went to Troy because on that one the photographer was our lead, and we modeled things to her work. In the other, the poet was kind of in the lead, and things came into place from there.

What’s next? Will you try anything different?

I don’t know. We could certainly do it again the way we have. Each of the poets said, “If you ever do it again, give the poets more time!” It took a lot of time as it was. I collected the tape in Troy, and then had to sit and wait until the poetry was done.

My instinct would be to see if it’s possible to do something more immediate, where the poetry could happen more in the moment. My thought is that we could do it opportunistically. Let’s get a poet and just go and actually report, the way you do an interview. You couldn’t do a suite of poems that way. But if there were an event, a breaking news story, it could be nice to cover it the way a reporter would. I’d be interested in seeing how that might work.

[Check out our commentary on "Women of Troy" and see more examples of poetry in journalism. Or read our interview with Virginia Quarterly Review's Ted Genoways on recapturing a documentary role for poetry.]