FotoEvidence is proud to announce 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 2025 award called for work addressing the alarming rise of the right-wing populism across the globe and its threat to r hard-won progress for women, LGBTQI+ and other marginalized communities.

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 require 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.

"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."