Learning to Love the People in the Picture: Photojournalist Brenda Ann Kenneally on Trauma, Truth, and Unconditional Love

Transcript auto-generated from the episode audio; formatting has been cleaned up, but wording is verbatim.

I want you to love the people in them. It's as simple as that. I want you to love them. I couldn't photograph anyone I didn't love. One of the things I always say about my work is I'm not interested in things as they are. I want to know how they got that way. Trying to make the good picture is the death of all connection. And it might be the death, in fact, of a good picture itself. To me, all that chaos and disorder is love. I'm Cynthia Marks, and I head up the Holistic Psychoanalysis Foundation, established by my late husband, Doctor Bernard Bail.

Welcome to And Now Love. We talk a lot on our podcast about the absolute necessity of separating our true selves from the trauma we carry. Doctor Bail always reminded us that so much of our emotional suffering comes from the stories we hide, from the stories we make up, the stories we wear. We can't truly love ourselves or anyone else until we shed light on the trauma and the stories we tell ourselves that are, in actuality, bearing down on who we are meant to be. Today's guest has spent much of her life doing exactly this, but through the lens of a camera.

I am so honored to welcome Brenda Ann Kenneally to the podcast. Brenda is an acclaimed photojournalist and documentary photographer and is recognized for her work addressing social issues such as poverty, addiction, and the underground drug economy. She is a frequent contributor to The New York Times Magazine and has won several major photojournalism awards. Brenda is a true legendary documentary photographer. She literally moves into the margins of society and lives amongst the families who have been completely left behind or ignored by the world.

Her work is raw, honest and deeply beautiful. When you look at her photos, you are forced to look at the parts of the human story we usually turn away from to me. Her camera is doing much of the same work we try to do here stripping away the armor, breaking down the stigmas, and digging deep so that we may clearly see beyond our trauma. That was a lot. And thank you for your patience. And Brenda. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. Cynthia. That was beautiful. I think you said it all. There's so much to talk about. What you're doing now is fabulous.

How you got to where you are now is such a wonderful story to tell, both hard and joyous. So if you don't mind, share with us some of your journey. How did you get to the place where you understood that photography was life changing? What was life like before that? I'm quite sure that for me, love from the very beginning was associated with truth and honesty. And I know this because I did not come from a place that felt that was necessary, valued it, or even understood what that was. And so I craved an unconditional love and the space to be honest and to be my full self.

And I mean, I'm talking about from the time I was ten, certainly by the time I was 12, I had older friends very interested in music, which is a big part of my love journey, and they really taught me about the absurdity of the manmade systems of the world. And this was, in fact, on the tail end of the counterculture. But I learned about the truth and the effort to systemically deny that in who I was personally, my soul following what felt right, and then systemically, which I would many decades later, understand as oppression, certainly economic and all that money is a symbol of it.

At a young age, though, when you were understanding that truth and love were tied together. Was this something that you knew consciously or unconsciously? Well, I rebelled. I had two parents at one point. They were divorced when divorce was new Catholic Church. My mother was very responsible, long suffering, one who was absolutely emotionless. She was raised that way. She never wanted to have children. She felt trapped, denied her what we now call authentic self. And I understood this authenticity, although I didn't have the words. This wasn't even language that regular folk used, so my mother had that being denied who she felt that she really was.

That wasn't a thing. If you were a woman of a certain economic class, I mean, we were poor. That's it. We were poor. We didn't have anything. My father was a cab driver, and my mother didn't start working until after they divorced. But anyway, she was the long suffering one who I never got any love from. And whoever who always said, oh, we don't want to talk about that. Let's not go there. And who was absolutely terrified by my rebellion. I was the family truth teller, which I would later learn is a position in many families. And we become, you know, the kind of outcast depending on, again, economically, it's scary when you're a kind of body girl from a post-industrial town in decline, and you're supposed to just put your shoulder to the grindstone and your nose to the wheel, or if it's the other way around and just suffer it out.

So there was mom, but then there was my father, who was this taxi driver, very handsome, who was forthcoming. I later documented him for years before he died, and he was very honest about himself. He had also spent some time in Alcoholics Anonymous, but also had some some other mental health issues. But I learned the person that I was supposed to really feel love from, the one who actually practically took care of me from him. Fast forward to when I. Not having really an outlet for that Catholic school, and a trajectory where authentic self is squashed at every like that is the job of the institutions that I went to.

So that was very much like the experience you were having at home with your mom then. Yes. And so being tamped down, I would say from the time when I realized that most of the things I was taught to believe were not really true and were made up. You suffer now and not even looking forward to the reward, suffering and morality when hand in hand. That led to drinking at an early age. That same age, when I was 12, I wound up leaving home, hitchhiking around full on alcoholic, getting arrested drunk and disorderly. What did the drinking do for you?

It really opened up my rebellion and everyone was a liar. I mean, authority, I, you know, detested. And I became a fighter. I became a fighter. But all of this was a screaming attempt to be loved. I was pretty violent. I was a scrapper. That's the way we were in our in our neighborhood. We showed a motion through fists, and that was just part of our coming of age and communication skills. Was there something about that? And maybe this is just what some of us assume. Was there something about that toughness that was, in a way, protecting you from the lack of love?

For me, I was screaming for someone to pay attention to the dishonesty and to the veil of what was preventing our true souls to actually grow. I felt that I was a dreamer. I went to the circus and I wanted a trapeze in our living room. That was a huge thing. I was in love with all the women that were shiny, sequined bathing suits and types. And I would beg my mother for a trapeze. I mean, it's a small thing, but it probably is a metaphor for the whole of childhood, and I could not understand why we couldn't have one. And all the reasons that my mother told me when she bothered to finally give me a reason, because I was relentless.

They didn't seem like they held water. This projector that we're not supposed to dream, we're not supposed to broaden our possibilities, and we are not supposed to talk about that. And when you do, and the more people stopped me from talking about it, the louder the more rebellious and the more that, of course, turned in on myself. So in your rebellion, did you not have the words to describe what it was you knew to be correct from a soul motivated experience? Or did you have the words? Could you say, I am entitled to my dreams? I here's what I think.

Here's what I need. Here's what is right in my world. Or was the rebellion a way to just kind of get emotions out without being able to put words to it? I mean, I know now, of course, no, I didn't have the words. This is all, in retrospect, bad kind of empathy, just a tumultuous time when my mother was pregnant and my father and he was an alcoholic and all those things. So that's really in there, that whole love as as a chemistry, the bonding, the serotonin, the oxytocin, the the real chemistry of love was also lacking. I learned that there was a lot of unpacking that needed to be done.

And then, of course, that plays into your your economic future, especially if you start out when you're in a marginalized neighborhood or what we would call now low wealth, education, money, culture, all of the spectrum of things that that foster possibility dreams. I mean, obviously, I got mine from going to Barnum and Bailey Circus. You know, that was where I got my dreams from. Yeah, that the idea of the circus and the trapeze is, you know, fantastical, too. To me, what you're describing in terms of your experience, your rebelliousness, your your thirst for that kind of feeling, so many people are starving for what you're describing and that you're describing it to us now, I think is is so lovely because I think a lot of people are like, oh yeah, okay, so there's more to this picture than I've been told there is, and it's okay for me to step outside of that.

Also, I craved beauty and individuality and outrageousness again. I had an older group of friends and they were into rock and roll and the outfits. Janis Joplin sorry, I went to the library. I looked in the periodic table of contents, and I found where images were in magazines in the library, and I cut them out and stole them. I felt, I felt I, I was entitled to them because I needed them so badly. And I still have them. But now you can, just before you even dream it, it's already on your device. It is. You're right. It's difficult to discern between the two.

What is your dream versus what's being presented to you? Well, I mean, I would say that I'm vulnerable to that to a degree that almost no one could escape unless you really don't have any contact with the wider world. I think that the idea of beauty and love was also very important, and all these things later you could almost do. This is what that meant to me now. And if we're a book or a foldout, you could trace that feeling, right? Because it's a feeling that I embraced where where we were pretty much taught to deny our feelings, like the words unconditional love or learning to love yourself unconditionally or self care.

I mean, as far as I know, they weren't invented yet in my childhood. Yes, that's all pretty new. Especially if you come from a certain culture. This post-industrial in upstate New York was really devoid of that because that American dream, that system that I understand. And so it was very hard for people to realize that they had kind of been fed a bill of goods with working hard. And this is how you're going to spend your life, and you're going to get these things and you're going to delay gratification so you can have a washing machine or whatever it was at the time.

And so there was a real effort to hold on to that. And then along comes the counterculture, which also was not for poor kids like me. The idea of love, authenticity and being able to tell your truth. And it's safe to say these things that you're not risking. You're very essential love of the people that are taking care of you, you know, parents and that, of course, that would extend to teachers, friends and then intimate lovers. I did turn to alcohol and other substances, even spending some time in jail. But interestingly, I would always go back.

It wasn't like anybody ever found me and brought me back, but I would always go back because I was still craving that. I was still craving that acceptance of the tribe that I came from. Yes. I think we often, you know, want to keep this vision in our heads because we have hope. You know, this is what I really want this to be. I'm going to go and it is going to be that thing. And then we're again disappointed because that hope that we have can't be satisfied in that way. You know, sadly. It's also a reason that I know. And trying to bring it up to the work that I do now.

So all these things was the climate in which the person that you described at the beginning of our talk was able to break through and be formed and sort of answer the heart path. Let's get to that. So you were helping yourself through addiction, and that was through AA and the support of other people who were loving you. And you eventually found photography as sort of an outlet to express yourself. Or was photography something to just take your mind off of the things that were not suitable? Or maybe that's one and the same. All of these things are tied to recovery.

I could have started the whole thing with associating love and honesty, and then the way not having that environment in my formative years, and in fact, I wasn't born into it, played into addiction, really fed into it and then also manifest in recovery. So recovery, particularly in a 12 step program, is based on the triangle of AA, unity, love and service. This made sense to me, but the foundation of that is honesty and admitting powerlessness, admitting basically, if I translated powerlessness, it would be that the systems with which in which I was born into and had to navigate and rebelled against, I am powerless over.

But I am able to set my spirit and my soul free and invest in an authentic life that I want to show up for, which means staying sober. You know, I was raised Catholic, so sometimes, you know, I'm into Jesus. He was a radical, so I like that. But for me, that has always been collective humanity. And I always saw a need. I always understood that many people were able to alleviate that suffering and did not. And so this never made sense to me. Things that make sense, like service to humanity and unity and love. As a practical act of understanding, I was able to flourish as a human who has been able to offer some service to the larger collective of us through AA, and it just that now, the strange thing is, is that I became a photographer in AA, purely because I also have always answered the call of my heart.

This got me in trouble. It got me jailed. It got me saying things that nobody wanted to hear. I pursued this other path that Carlos Castaneda would say. All roads, all past lead nowhere. So choose the one that has heart. And I never heard that until, you know, a decade ago. But that's the way I lived. So anyway, getting into AA, going through the steps of recovery, having a sponsor who loved me unconditionally, where I looked at my life in honest reflection and looked for patterns. So it wasn't me judging myself. Mine kind of took the form of grandiosity that I'm also, you know, the worst human on the planet.

So I had to learn that looking at myself honestly through the patterns of behavior, rebelliousness and and many other things, fear is a huge one. Were real. Those things were actually real in my childhood. And so the coping mechanisms as you spoke of that allowed me to get to the point of adulthood. Luckily, I didn't have to build more regret and damage because it's already been enough to deal with in that short time. But I'm still unpacking that wreckage in those messages. I needed to start building a life, and I didn't even know how to do this.

I had just been getting from one safe space to the next, and so I needed something to do. I had gone to community college, I had made a few pictures, and this part was probably really important. I made a few pictures of a squirrel on a garbage can black and white film. I learned how to develop it myself and print it. And so my sponsor, who really became like my mom, saw them and she said, just like with the most naive thing you could say, she looked at the picture of the squirrel in the garbage can and she said, why don't you do this? Literally?

Why don't you do this? So I thought, I don't know, I don't even know if that's the thing. So the thought hadn't entered your mind that this was a path you would take. You were you were just taking these photographs, not knowing that you were so wonderful at it. Well, the larger point is trusting someone spiritually and saying, yeah, why don't I do that? Meanwhile, the world that I came from and this is where I fail, that was divine intervention. The world that I came from, photography wasn't a thing. I mean, in honesty, photography has only become a thing.

More recently, I didn't have exposure to art or anything. This is why it's like almost like the Immaculate Conception. So coupled with that, I needed a sober job. And so I got a job in sobriety, working for this guy who was a construction worker, and he was so emotional. And when you're newly sober, you want to pretty much keep your emotions on an even keel. You don't want to be in a situation where it's very stressful, where you're going to trigger yourself or be angry. So here's this guy and two newly sober people working in his office, and when he would get upset, he would literally start to rent his clothing.

He would he would rip the shirt off his back. I still remember his name. I'm not going to say it. And I was reading a book I had gotten from the library about Diane Arbus. She has become the face of people that I just mentioned who changed the face of photography in the Museum of Modern Art, and it was about a debutante named Brenda Frazier, who was the most photographed woman in the world and been on life magazine and was, like, very beautiful, considered one of the most beautiful. The photograph that I saw was a picture of Brenda Frazier. Very frail, still beautiful, but chiseled, probably in her 40s and 50s.

It was hard to tell in her boudoir, with the feathers and all that, and a glass like a whiskey next to her bed. So I was very intrigued by this photo name. Same as mine, and not even sure if I knew what a debutante was. I'm sure I didn't. So I then began to somehow find out who Diane Arbus was again. No, internet can't even figure out how this happened. So I went to the library, got this biography of Diane Arbus. I was reading about this woman who felt detached from life. Although she was very wealthy, her feelings seemed like mine, and I understood that photography was a thing.

And they also called her the freak photographer and described carnivals and circuses, things like that, that I, you know, back to my trapeze days I had always been intrigued with, and I became obsessed with this woman, my mother and father both disabled. My father was schizophrenic, alcoholic, would do some very interesting things, and my mother got multiple sclerosis when she was 30 and she was bedridden for like 50 years. My brother and sister and I, we always felt there was a shame about that, really. I think that's how I, I identified with the freak photographer thing.

I started looking at journalism. I started looking at all I could get my hands on and photography books very difficult to find. Going to the library and really teaching myself what that was about. And I would go to lectures. I couldn't afford to workshops, but you could go to lectures from name band photographers for like a double bill for $3. I saw Sally Man and Eugene Richards and I applied to the University of Miami for their photojournalism department. I had to answer questions about my arrest records. I learned that the wreckage of my past was to stay with me, and my sponsor walked me through it.

She said, don't aim to high, and I did. I took out all those loans, which were a lot of money, and I had no idea how I was ever going to pay them back. But I knew that I wanted to be in a community of people that was doing this thing that I didn't even know that was a thing. My recovery allowed me to be amongst people that I would have been intimidated, that I felt like a freak around, really. And just thinking about this now because. Because later when I would do, particularly the upstate girls work, when I would go back to my neighborhood because I had hitchhiked to Miami by then and really emancipated myself in every way, which basically means like, you leave your entire past behind.

I immediately took my camera, went to the downtown streets of Miami, volunteered at a soup kitchen and a shelter called Camillus House. And by then it was a lot of people who were coming from Cuba through the Mariel boatlift, and there was a lot of just people, really, who had been dumped and discarded on the streets, largely Spanish men. The only fear I felt was being rejected by those people and not being loved. I associated the camera with love, with our ability to be able to talk about ourselves, and I always revealed as much of myself as I asked of other people, and that has been true to today.

My most intimate relationships and most loving have been with that camera there, and now. I just know that it's incidental. The pictures you make, that's not even the goal. They're just residue of the time that you had and what you've learned from each other and the family that you've created. So how does that work for you? You're creating a photograph that, as you say, it's not about the photo, but I get to see the photo. And I get to understand that in order to create a photo like you've created, there's a giant human connection, because I don't see how you could tell us so much about these people and their experience, unless you're in it with them.

When you say the camera was sort of love, was the camera kind of giving you a gift or a way in to the experiences of these other people? It's a rendering tool. If I was a writer, you're there and you're observing and then you are rendering it. Post experience. I'm rendering the experience and as much for myself. However, those photographs have always been for us, by us first and foremost. It's part of my own healing, and I probably didn't realize that. I realized that more and more, that rebellious youth that I was has been able to stay with the family that I've created when I wasn't really able to ever make a place for myself and my birth family.

So what about this family that you created when you say that to us? What is that? It's happened several ways. I had a street family when I was on the streets of Miami. You know, I was a regular. I'd go, I'd spend holidays there. They would see the photos. They were quite anxious and happy to be seen, and then understood that the unconditional love comes from. There's not a lot of artistry in my photos. Probably none. As a matter of fact, if I have an esthetic, it is the D.R. of the photographs I see that, you know, traditionally that still remains from the time of the Farm Security Administration.

You know, Dorothea Lange, there were things that were conservatively more beautiful photographs made. And I believe that the face of marginalization has changed. And certainly my approach to it. There is an opportunity for unconditional love, and folks are craving that. I mean, not everybody, not everybody wants to participate. I would start something and then at the end of a five or 10 or 20 year stint, people were bringing me their friends like it was a movement, really was started. And so that went to when I moved in Brooklyn. There was kids playing in the street.

My own son was growing up. I started going out with the camera that became about women and the disparity in sentencing under the Rockefeller drug laws. But I never go into something from, Im going to do a story on this. There's a connection with people. One of the kind of things I always say about my work is I'm not interested in things as they are. I want to know how they got that way. This is true of myself and recovery. This is true of an image later with the internet when everything's deacon Textualist is context, context, context. That kind of understanding and unpacking the way things are again reinforces the pathway and strengthens it to I'm conditional love because you are understanding how things got that way.

And that's the important part really. I think so too. And I think that your photographs, they create a tension. I think in many of us, I think it's our connection, perhaps with our own trauma that we're not used to looking at. And you've put some amount of trauma right in front of us. I see in your photographs so much depth about these people. It so much depth about this family that you have. There's a love there. I can see it in the chaos and the disorder that sometimes is shown around the individuals in your photographs. Is that purposeful? Is that just me?

I've heard others say they feel the same way about your photographs. First of all, to me, all that chaos and disorder is love. Nothing feels like love more than being in a kitchen full of kids and babies and brightly colored food and a lot of dogs. As far as the trauma goes, you know, I'm not going to romanticize that. That's also very traumatic. And I have spent a lifetime trying to separate the two. What I understand is trauma and love mixed together. And I've been married three times, so I've had a lot of a lot of practice. And I see that too.

Trauma forms or idea of love? Absolutely. For sure. It forms who you're going to be attracted to. And I've even when I've given talks with child psychologist, one in particular said about one of the kids, how do they experience happiness? She said, well, in fact, for that child, that might be a very uncomfortable feeling. I converge these a lot with the economy, with social mobility, showing what poverty looks like. Great. What it feels like is much more important. The goal for me is not to impose the life that I want on others. This is also part of unconditional love.

Yes, well, we are so used to judging situations from our own perspective. You know, we we, I think, typically assume that the others experience the other's feelings about any given situation, match ours, or should match ours. And, you know, in order for us to really separate what we think is love from real love, we have to dig deep. We have to think about our own trauma and whether that is us or whether it's something we're carrying. Is it something that we support so that we can survive? What happens when we undo that trauma? Where do we find true love?

If we think that's love, why would we give it up even though it hurts? And I feel like what you're describing. And again, for me, what I see in your photos is, is that what do you want? Those of us that are looking at your photos to, to glean, to learn to know. I want you to love the people in them. It's as simple as that. I want you to love them. I couldn't photograph anyone I didn't love, and I'm also working on Skid Row with a group of artists there. And now I have a community in the desert which is my my now tribe seniors. And not only when you're making the photos is there a counter narrative visually in the residue of the photograph?

But there's touching, there's touching, there's an intimate contact which has become more and more part of the work. So the photograph is really a point of entry. It is my way of communication, of course, and it has been a valuable connecting tool. But it's not like the point of doing what I do, really. I understand. And and then for the individuals that you've come to know intimately that are in your photographs, what is it that you're hoping they glean from this experience? First of all, we've all grown up together in various ways, been through deaths of parents, siblings, getting shot on the street, babies born.

I almost can't remember how many babies that I've been there when they're born. Some tragic thing with parents that have been sent to prison for life for egregious acts. So I have been there through all of that, like whether I have a camera or not. This is the solidarity that I have chosen. And when I now, as an old woman, look back on my life, that's where I have spent my years and my, my, the sands of my hourglass. I told you I photographed my father. I went back and started talking to my mother again because we were largely estranged the most of my life.

I asked my mother because I came upon my birth certificate and I had not been named on the birth certificate was baby girl Cornelia, and then baby girl was crossed out. And then my name was written in Brenda Anne. I said, well, that's you know, I don't know anybody named Brenda. It must have been Brenda Lee, my mother's Aaron. She said, no. When I was at the doctor, I saw this news clipping of a very fancy lady. I looked at it and I thought, oh, that's an interesting name. And so that's how I named you. Now I have no way of confirming this, but I have some pretty good suspicions that this was that Brenda Fraser character who would be written about for years in that era.

So when I do these stories, when the end comes back to me at the beginning, it feels like it proves to be true. Like you would prove a math problem. Having people understand the systems that they work in, how difficult their lives are, how joyful it is having kids, even if it's a struggle, their loves are validated in other cases. Many people have died because we know you live about a decade less than folks with college educations or other possibilities feel that they're kind of trapped in this flat line trajectory. So it becomes a record that I might like to have myself.

And it's a way for those lives to exist into history and become part of history. And we've done that, too. We've done scrapbooks. We've done many, many activities that now exist in the local historical society. Well, your and your scrapbooks are great. So the work evolved, as did my understanding of it. I became less and less concerned with, you know, being a good photographer or making the good picture. Trying to make the good picture is the death of all connection. And it might be the death, in fact, of a good picture itself. It might be. I think that is an issue across all sorts of creative methodology.

The more you try to make a perfect outcome, the less perfect it can be. So you have you have a book out that's been really well received and you have just published a second book, or you're about to. I have two books. I have the book from my neighborhood in Brooklyn and where I just, you know, that neighborhood also gentrified several of the young people killed on the streets at gunshot and some, you know, have suffered wounds. And that book is called. That's that's called money, power, respect Pictures of My neighborhood. And then the other book, Upstate Girls, is the first of two.

But that book delved a lot more into the the outcome of the social, of the level of social investment, or lack thereof, in the lives of these kids that I saw born. You can see how that really manifests. If I was a sociologist or a psychologist, this is a study that's invaluable, showing that the outcome is really important because that includes all of the programs that we did and how that actually created, created change. And then there'll be the book about me, baby girl Camille, which I always called from the beginning, this weird thing, investigations of an undercover human being, because I never felt comfortable calling myself a photojournalist or anything that set myself apart from my people.

It seemed very lofty and snobby. What I learn about is my own trauma and how I can heal that to be of greater service. My thought was that the girls upstate, I always had to stay a step ahead of them, because when we stayed on par, I wasn't able to to make a safe space for them as we moved ahead. All of that to say, the search of love I created for them and then for my own son and for others, the safe space of unconditional love that I've always craved since since I was baby girl. Well, that's speaking of circling back you in the beginning, we're speaking of how service to others becomes an important part of healing, an important part of separating ourselves from our trauma.

And this is what I see happening in your your photographs for you, for yourself or those that are in your photographs. And for those of us who can look deeply into what it is you're showing us. But thank you so much for sharing what you do and what you know, and how you support these people and what you're learning from it, and how your life continues to change. And your book, hopefully the book that you're trying to publish will be published, and we can just keep our eyes on your name and and your photographs, and we'll hopefully stay in touch and you can share more with us as you continue to grow.

Well, thank you so much. This has been a lot, a lot to think about and it's all over the place. But when we're talking about love, that's kind of how it is messy yet the most powerful thing in the. World, the most powerful thing in the world. And we're sort of in dire straits. And however we can bring the idea of love forward, we want to do that because it is our best tool. And it's it's the thing we all need to find out about ourselves and then about each other. And thank you very, very much for taking this path and and really knowing what love is, really knowing what love is.

I appreciate that so much. Thank you for your time with us today. Thank you so much, Cynthia. Love you. Love you too. Thank you. Please follow, rate and share this podcast and pass this episode along to someone who might need it. This is and now love. Listen to your dreams and live from your heart. Thank you.