"Hip Hop: By All Means Necessary" an award winning documentary

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"Hip Hop: By All Means Necessary" an award winning documentary

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Brenda Ann Kenneally manifests a sense of fearlessness. She allows her camera to establish a relationship between her and those photographed.

With complete disregard to awkwardness and rejection, Kenneally’s photos are of the perspective of an intimate observer.

She is an award-winning photojournalist who has been recently portraying the unfortunate and trapping circumstances of people living in <?xml:namespace prefix = st1 ns = "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:smarttags" />New York. The images developed from Kenneally’s camera takes a viewer to dimensions where drugs, sex and tough relationships are reality, the only reality.

“There’s an intimacy about her photo-making,” said a University of Miami Visual Communications professor Lelen Bourgoignie-Robert. “The whole Zen of photography is being 100 percent present.”

That level of intimacy, according to Bourgoignie-Robert, is achieved when a photographer listens to and understands the background of who they are photographing.

This is a background Kenneally knew well. Because she grew up in a working class family from whose hands she would often slip out of into the juvenile justice system, the stories she now photographs could have been her own if she hadn’t left her hometown Albany, N.Y.

Kenneally’s book Money Power Respect Picture of my Neighborhood: Brenda Ann Kenneally shows a culture in which generation after generation are becoming more reliant on drugs stumping their lifestyle to what has always been - a static neighborhood where few are able to leave and achieve success. 

Kenneally was 16 years old when she arrived to live independently in South Florida to escape such a lifestyle. She felt there were “only better things to move on to” which motivated her to then seek making a living and to further her education.

“I always wanted to study, but I was never encouraged,” Kenneally said. “I always knew that knowledge is power and I was powerless.”

However, she continued some old habits. In Money Power Respect, she wrote, “I was twenty-six before I suspected that the alcohol and other drugs I had grown up with were no longer working for me: with consistent chemical abuse came continued bouts with the law, constant depression, and the secret wish for a short life.”

Eventually, Kenneally found a job as a stock broker and considered nursing at one point. However, none of those careers sparked a passion in her.

“I read a book about Diane Arbus [a photojournalist]. She felt she wasn’t connected to the world and I related to her,” said Kenneally adding that the camera was a way to connect to the world. So, she began a higher education at Broward Community College to then transfer to the University of Miami.

In her late 30’s, Kenneally graduated from UM with a B.S. degree in sociology and photojournalism before she attained a Master’s degree in studio art from New York University. She also taught courses in UM’s School of Communication for a short while.\

By this time, she had already finished a peer counseling program and her addiction to drugs and alcohol.

After finding happiness in photography, some of the first pictures she took were of her father. Today, Kenneally is working on a documentary about him who she says is a “great character that represents the old image, fall to the earth, of maleness.”

Her father “fancied himself as a hustler” who gambles, smokes and has used drugs. Despite the tough childhood Kenneally remembers sharing with her father, she says that the documentary is to preserve who he is.

“It’s my way to love someone more, behind the camera,” Kenneally said. She described how she compared a picture she took years ago with a recent one of her father lying down on a bed in the same position with an ashtray on his chest.

She also mentioned he is her only relative besides her 12 year old son who says is proud of his mother. To her son, Kenneally gave only one rule, “I want him to be passionate about something.”

Kenneally has followed the rule herself by pursuing her passion in visual communications to show an issue she cares much about, but this time through a documentary called “Hip Hop: By All Means Necessary.”

“Brenda’s intentions were to deglamorize the harsh reality of life in the projects for black youth,” said Konstantia Kontaxis, UM professor and co-producer of the film. In particular, Kenneally followed black rap artists trying to escape the projects by means of a record contract.

Both Kenneally and Kontaxis said that the projects’ residents have limited opportunities to change their lifestyles partly due to sociological and economic reasons.

The 2007 Park City Film Music Festival recently awarded the film the Silver Medal for Excellence in the Best Documentary on  Musical Subject category.

Jeffrey Stern, UM professor of the Motion Pictures department, found startling how certain people who live in the projects are “holding their own people down by selling drugs to them.”

Stern edited the sound for the film which was debuted in New York during VH1’s Honors Week in October. He says the film showed Kenneally’s usual “unprecedented access” to the people’s lives who were filmed.

“If they want their story to be told, they will let me get close,” Kenneally said. “I never assume there’s going to be limits to that.”

Serving as a prelude for her documentary, Kenneally also established a website which was set up by UM Professors Lelen Bourgoignie-Robert and Kim Grinfeder. The website address is www.brendakenneally.com.

Kenneally’s other award-winning project include Upstate Girls featuring women living in Troy, N.Y. whose culture normally involves smoking and having children at young ages, moving in and out of prison and dating boyfriends who end up in jail.

Upstate Girls won a first place Community Awareness Award from Pictures of the Year International. One of the judges praised Kenneally’s entry because “it felt real” and showed Kenneally’s extensive effort in getting the genuine “slice of life.”

As a freelance photojournalist, Kenneally has won various awards including the 2001 Fifty Crows Photo Fund and the 2005 NPPA-Nikon Documentary Sabbatical Grant.

Yet, she is modest about her talent. She describes her work as being too personal for photojournalism and too journalistic for art. She describes herself as being more of a “cultural anthropologist” rather than a photojournalist.