MARSEILLAN.- FotoEvidence announced that the jury has selected Stacy Kranitz as the laureate of the 2025 FotoEvidence W Awar and her project After a Denied Abortion will be published in a book. Three photographers were selected as finalists:

• Iva Sidash with Seeing the Unseen

• Laila Nahar with The Crescent Moon

• Sanna Mattoo with Good Story but Bad Narrative

The FotoEvidence W Award grants to publication of a book for a female-identifying photographer who has a personal story with social import that merits a book. The 2025 award called for work addressing the alarming rise of the right-wing populism across the globe and its threat to the hard-won progress for women, LGBTQI+ and other marginalized communities. The 2025 jury included: Rehab Eldalil, Maria Mann, Evgenia Maximova, Lauren Walsh, and Svetlana Bachevanova.

Stacy Kranitz is an artist and journalist working in the documentary tradition. She was born in Kentucky and currently lives in the Appalachian Mountains of eastern Tennessee. She has received a Pulitzer Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship for her work. Solo exhibitions of her photographs have been presented at the Rencontres d’Arles in Arles, France, the Cortona on the Move in Cortona, Italy, and the Tennessee Triennial in Chattanooga, TN. Her photographs are in several public collections, including the Harvard Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Art, Houston, and Duke University, Archive of Documentary Arts. She works on assignments for publications including Time, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, the Atlantic, ProPublica, and Mother Jones. Her first monograph, As it Was Give(n) to Me, was published by Twin Palms in 2022. It was shortlisted for a Paris Photo - Aperture Photobook Award.

After a Denied Abortion

"They forced me, basically, to have a child," Mayron said of the state after the abortion ban. But then, "they didn't help me take care of that child."

Stacy Kranitz lives in Tennessee, where almost all abortions are banned but where few resources are devoted to providing security for children once they are born. After a Denied Abortion follows Mayron Hollis, a recovering addict, who faced a life-threatening pregnancy but was not able to obtain an abortion. Her daughter Elayna was one of the first babies born after a denied abortion, following the overturning of Roe vs. Wade by the Supreme Court.

Kranitz followed Mayron and her daughter Elayna for a year, knowing the challenges they would face with Mayron's history with the child welfare and criminal justice systems, her history of addiction, her family's precarious finances, and Tennessee's poor outcomes for maternal health, infant mortality, and child poverty. She also knew that Elayna, born prematurely, would required significant ongoing medical care. The resulting visual story shows how one family's personal lived experience reveals many gaps in the social safety net in a post-Roe state, where abortions are not available.