Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down (PRE-ORDER)
Stacy Kranitz
Terrible Baby
Available to pre-order - this title is due to ship in October
210 x 275mm
260 pages
77 color photographs, 92 black and white archival and press photographs, and 40 black and white and color documents.
Includes a supplementary booklet with texts by Matthew Algeo, Stacy Kranitz, Andrew Malan Milward, Mesha Maren and Whitney Phillips.
Printed offset litho on coated and uncoated FSC-certified paper, ottabind softback.
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.
