In Focus: "Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” by Stacy Kranitz

The Uncomfortable Legacy of Representing Appalachia

“In Focus” is Der Greif’s photobook review series, spotlighting our picks from the current open call for submissions and our community artists' publications. This month’s pick is Stacy Kranitz’s new photobook, "Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," published by Terrible Baby and Éditions Images Vevey.

If I had to say I’m from anywhere, and the measure was where I have lived the longest and most consecutively, then I am from the Piedmont region of North Carolina. Parts of the Piedmont contain eroded remnants of ancient mountain chains from hundreds of millions of years ago, the deep foothills of the broader Appalachian system, making me at least as qualified to write on Appalachia as JD Vance is. To me, Kranitz’s monumental new photobook, "Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down," feels urgent. As someone who spends considerable time thinking about what constitutes ‘American-ness’ and teaching on the ethics of photographic representation at a rural college, Kranitz’s work smartly questions who is qualified to represent whom. Gathering seventeen years of photographs, archival research, and literary texts, Kranitz traces the complex social history of Appalachia through the central narrative thread of Pat Greene, a West Virginia native she met in 2013 whose life connects intimate regional history to broader political forces, confronting influential, self-blaming accounts by figures like Harry Caudill and JD Vance, both of which recycle an insidious legacy of victim-blaming those at the end of a capitalist pipeline.

Growing up, I got carsick on the bends of the Blue Ridge Parkway and accepted Jesus into my heart under the shadow of a cross on the shores of Lake Junaluska. I volunteered with my youth group in ‘impoverished’ areas and still remember the shame that befell my little heart as I coated layers of flamingo pink paint across splitting siding. It was a brand of Christian missionarying that has historically contributed to framing the conditions of poverty in Appalachia as a personal moral failing, explicitly dictating what constitutes being a good or bad person. This is the same shame that would creep up on me whenever my next-door neighbors had their cousins from West Virginia visit, and my parents made disparaging comments about the way they stuck out in our brand-new suburban neighborhood. A bizarre irony, coming from people raised in the rural mountains of Southern Germany, a region often stereotyped as backwoods. Class anxiety and regional prejudice have a way of repeating across borders, masking as cultural superiority.

Why should we be surprised that we’ve represented poverty in America this way when we do this to other countries all the time? Who is the real ‘other’? In America, we are the other to ourselves.

In her introductory essay, "THE RAPE OF APPALACHIA," Kranitz directly charts how this framework of "blaming one's own people" evolved. She details how lawyer Harry Caudill initially exposed coal company exploitation in his 1963 book “Night Comes to the Cumberlands”, only to grow disillusioned when federal aid failed to transform the region, ultimately concluding that poverty was "genetic in origin" and inviting eugenicist William Shockley to Kentucky to propose sterilizing mountain families. Kranitz illustrates how Vance’s “Hillbilly Elegy” operates through this same eugenicist framework, turning real struggles like the opioid epidemic into a moral verdict where poor communities are held solely responsible for their own systemic extraction.

Kranitz juxtaposes this dark intellectual history with top-down political spectacles like President Lyndon B. Johnson’s 1964 War on Poverty tour. As contributor Matthew Algeo details in his essay for the book, LBJ launched the initiative from the porch of Tom Fletcher, an unemployed Kentucky miner who was overnight turned into a national poster child for destitution. The media labeled his home a "tar paper shack," vexing Fletcher, who felt his house was decent, and hounded him for decades, culminating in a grotesque New York Times headline years later: "War on Poverty Symbol Accused of Murder.”

Against this backdrop of historic caricature, Kranitz scrutinizes her own images. Reflecting on a photograph of Pat’s friend Shawn feeding his daughter Mountain Dew from a baby bottle, Kranitz asks whether the shot inherently marks him as a "bad dad," or if it demonstrates how easily a single photograph freezes a moment and surrenders it to false, stereotypic assumptions.

This impulse to reduce an entire region to a political prop or a single snapshot is not just a historical artifact; it is alive in how Americans talk past one another every day. At a gas station in a state somewhere between the Pacific and the start of the Great Plains, I overheard a man complaining that no one thought of his town when they pictured America. This was the "real" America, he insisted, not California or some liberal coastal hotspot. This right here, this gas station, was what should represent us. I bit my tongue and tried hard not to say anything about how one in four Americans is a Californian, which statistically makes it a pretty solid representation, or ask if he had ever actually been to the Golden Coast. That’s the core issue: we don’t know who ‘we’ are. We should be putting federal money into government exchange programs for high school seniors across the country to live in another state and experience America for themselves. Less than two percent of Americans have been to all 50 states, yet arguments about representation and the "real America" wage on without any of us knowing what is right around us.

This ongoing national anxiety over representation makes "Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down" so necessary. The publication acts as a self-aware research project that strikes a chord with those doubting the limits of photojournalism. Releasing around the same time as Taryn Simon’s Guggenheim takeover, it insists that photography is a complex system of information gathering and presentation rather than isolated, precious images hung on a wall.

Kranitz navigates spaces deemed ‘unintellectual’ alongside the high-art world with remarkable dexterity, placing herself directly within the frame. In doing so, she counters both a growing anti-intellectual strain in America and a fear that literary and artistic concerns inherently exclude working-class people. The history of photography is presented not as something to roll your eyes at in a textbook, but as a mechanism with real-world, visceral consequences.

I used to struggle to understand how photographers could ethically approach vulnerable or misrepresented communities. How do you bring joy to stereotyped spaces? I didn't “get it” until I was standing above someone I had become close to and asked how they wanted to be photographed. They requested a mode of representation I had previously assumed, from viewing other portfolios, was exploitative. I watched their eyes light up, going from cautious and camera-shy to wanting to shoot late into the night. Photographic “ethics” requires risking your own pain by being vulnerable and physically close to someone, getting on the back of a four-wheeler as Kranitz does with Pat's friend Dozer, accepting the risk of a drunken ATV ride with her camera strapped to her body, before getting crushed underneath it.

Included in the book is a sharp essay by Mesha Maren, "A CERTAIN SENSE OF DOUBT," which skillfully dissects photography’s relationship to Appalachian representation. Maren writes, "I am less interested in who has the right to view such images and more interested in the urge to make them."

Maren recounts the public backlash to Kranitz’s 2012 CNN photo essay on the series “Regression to the Mean,” where locals erupted in the comment section after CNN published images of Klan rallies and snake handlers under the headline "Everyday Life in Appalachia." Kranitz spent a week begging CNN to change the sensationalist headline. As Kranitz explained on her website during the ordeal:

"Representing place is a complicated series of negotiations. How can the photographer demystify stereotypes, sum up experience, interpret memory and history? Regression to the mean is a term used to define a phenomenon in statistical analysis. If a variable is extreme on its first measurement, it will tend to be closer to the average on its second measurement. This concept outlines my process, which requires many visits in order to gain a photographic series of images that averages these extremes. I am initially drawn to stereotypes. Then I look to demystify these stereotypes only to find that they are rooted in some sort of reality. I do not exclude the stereotypical image from my representations, nor do I only seek it out."

Kranitz’s admission that she is drawn to stereotypes, and her refusal to draw a hard line between "reality" and the clichés that hook an outsider's imagination, is incredibly earnest. There is a relatable pain in watching oneself grow as a photographer, realizing that the conventional modes of representation we were taught are fundamentally flawed. So many of us, like Kranitz, started with high-minded ambitions of being photojournalists, only to be scared off by the ethical pitfalls and corporate traps of an editorial media landscape that demands flattened narratives and rapid-fire content. What makes “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” so triumphant is that Kranitz didn't retreat; she kept going, taking control of the narrative through a relentless, self-aware practice. But as Maren presses: does Kranitz’s honesty or time spent with her subjects actually change the photographs, or just our perception of them?

As Maren points out, we cling to the comforting myth that an ‘insider’ or familiar visitor will not inflict the same harm as an outsider. Yet Appalachia’s history is a succession of well-meaning interlopers: settlers, Union soldiers, song catchers, missionaries, and photojournalists, each leaving behind another layer of romanticized extraction. In truth, the line between insider and outsider, or between helping and harming, is never clean.

This tension mirrors Abigail Solomon-Godeau’s 1995 essay "Inside/Out," where she analyzes Nan Goldin’s confessional mode of photography. Solomon-Godeau points out that even when an artist operates as a true insider, photographing their own intimate circle with total trust, it doesn't resolve the ethical complications of how those images are consumed once they enter galleries. Because photography is mechanically bound to capture exterior surfaces, the camera remains an external mechanism, a "third term" that cannot fully penetrate interior reality, no matter how loving the photographer's intent. Kranitz embraces this exact boundary, resisting what Maren calls the "over-eagerness to clench conclusions."

Long before opening Kranitz’s book, I was thinking about Elizabeth Barret’s documentary Stranger with a Camera (2000), which examines the 1967 murder of Canadian filmmaker Hugh O'Connor in Jeremiah, Kentucky. O'Connor was shot by local landowner Hobart Ison, who resented outsiders coming in to film local poverty for the War on Poverty. When one of my professors showed that film to a room full of trigger-happy undergraduates, many of whom were casually photographing unhoused individuals across San Diego County, it felt like an act of desperation by an educator trying to fast-track us into filling the gaps in our visual ethics and empathy.

Kranitz’s publication acts as the missing lynchpin within this long history of misaligned representations. Rather than repeating the hit-and-run tactics of well-meaning outsiders, “Ain’t No Grave Gonna Hold My Body Down” serves as a masterclass in long-term, embedded community work. By laying bare her own doubts, failures, and evolving relationships, Kranitz offers an invaluable educational model for artists and students alike, demonstrating how to approach a community as an intricate, ongoing dialogue that demands our own skin in the game.

Blending seventy-seven contemporary color photographs, nearly 100 archival images, and dozens of historical documents, Kranitz constructs a multi-layered narrative anchored by the life of Pat Greene. “Ain’t No Grave” interrogates the camera itself, examining photography as simultaneously a witness, an instrument of power, a tool for propaganda, and, at times, a vehicle for redemption.

This refusal to shy away from complex, uncomfortable truths sits at the heart of Terrible Baby, the Nashville-based photobook publisher founded by Sofia Krysiak and Jack Latham. Designed to translate difficult conversations and intricate research into tactile printed matter, Terrible Baby’s ethos directly informs the latest edition of Der Greif’s "Guest Room" open call ending on October 28th.

See more on our current Guest Room open call curated by Krysiak and Latham around the theme "Difficult Conversations," which extends the spirit of Kranitz’s work to a broader artistic community. In a landscape where visual language can expose as easily as it conceals, humanize as quickly as it stereotypes, the exhibition asks a central question: when verbal dialogue falters or collapses into division, how can photography help us confront the realities, blind spots, and stories we can no longer afford to avoid?