30 April 2024: In collaboration with the Magnum Foundation in New York City, 10×10 hosted a salon with Stacy Kranitz and Carly Ries.
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.
For the past fourteen years, Stacy Kranitz has been making photographs in the Appalachian region of the United States in order to explore how photography can solidify or demystify stereotypes, and interpret memory and history in a region where the medium has failed to provide an equitable depiction of its people. Kranitz discussed As It Was Give(n) To Me, her first monograph, which gathers twelve years of her work in Appalachia. She also shared her recent ProPublica project, A Year After a Denied Abortion.
Carly Ries presented their recent book Centerfold, a sequence of collaborative portraits and fragmented scenes from the pages of vintage XXX magazine pages that are detached from their original purpose and queered by the artist’s hands. Throughout their photographs and photobooks, Ries explores recurring symbols of nude iconography in art history and visual culture, appropriating archival imagery from pornography and anonymous sources to destabilize authorship.
Carly Ries is a lens-based artist living in Brooklyn, NY. Their photobooks are in the collections of The Metropolitan Museum of Art and The New York Public Library, among others. They received an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Ries oversees the Peter J. Cohen Collection, a vast archive of vernacular photographs from the 20th century and teaches photography at The New School.
Watch a video recording of salon #71 on 10×10 Photobooks’ YouTube channel.
A big thank you to Jasmin Chang, Kristen Lubben, Mecca and Shea Baasch for facilitating this salon, streaming and video editing.
Salon photos by Jeff Gutterman