Keliy Anderson-Staley

[Hyphen]-Americans: Tintype Portraits

Each image in this project presents a face and is titled simply with a first name. The title of the project alludes to the hyphenated character of American identities (Irish-American, African-American, etc.), while only emphasizing the shared American identity. Therefore, although the heritage of each individual might be inferred from assumptions we make about features and costumes, the viewer is encouraged to suspend the kind of thinking that would traditionally assist in decoding these images in the context of American identity politics.

Like the photographers of the 1850s, I use hand-poured chemistry that I mix myself according to original recipes, period brass lenses and wooden view cameras to expose positive images directly onto blackened aluminum and glass. The individuals I photograph look contemporary, but there is also something anachronistic about these images—a confusion about their place in history—as if they have been detached from time, and the viewer cannot quite put them back in their proper context. Yet, with their contemporary dress, tattoos and modern expressions, they can only truly belong to the current moment. The nineteenth-century collodion process was frequently used for "scientific" ethnographic studies of the human face, many of which were based in racist assumptions about physiognomy. In using this process, I hope to make the history of portrait photography one of my primary subjects. The project draws attention to the fact that images of ourselves exist within a history of images. Our identities are linked to the visual history of social difference, a history in which photography has not always played an innocent role.

Each portrait is a fairly straightforward likeness, and my sitter knows that it is for a project, that it will become part of a "collection" of hundreds of images, but they also participate in shaping the image that represents them. These resulting images are often exhibited among dozens of portraits, portraying Americans in all their variety. Echoes and patterns of similarity and difference can be found across the collection, but each portrait reminds us of the persistent uniqueness of human faces, and the common human denominator comes to the foreground.

Found Unfound

The first time I met my biological father was 2014, the same year I became a mother. Until the age of twelve, I didn’t know that my father, Tom, who had been raising us in an off-grid cabin in Maine, was not my “real” father. More shocking was that he had always known, but chose to raise me as his daughter. My mother gave me a single blurry photograph of my biological father—the only one she had—but I lost it a few years later. This lost photograph, and the significance it attained in its absence, became the inspiration for Found Unfound.

Over the past year, I’ve photographed both of my fathers, hoping to understand them, my childhood, and the role photography has played in my perception of family. The centerpiece of Found Unfound, is a set of tintype portraits of both men, presented as an intermixed grid. The men look uncannily similar and often difficult to tell apart. The portraits vary in their clarity and what they reveal; none can serve as a definitive portrait of the man.

A series of abstract collodion tintypes echo the chemical aberrations of the portraits. Made with chemistry in the darkroom, these pieces represent a hypothetical album and are each titled with the date and time they were made—a kind of journal of emotional states. Capturing the latent potential of the same process I use to make portraits, these abstract images are also a meditation on birth, becoming and the cycle of generations. The installation here is completed by a portrait of my mother, hung alone and only once alongside a portrait of my pregnant body. This project is an examination of time, the faultiness of memory and the difficulties of constructing family history from photographs. Found Unfound reflects the fundamental paradox of any photograph—that it can reveal a great deal and nothing at all, simultaneously.

Keliy Anderson-Staley was raised off the grid in Maine, studied photography in New York City and currently lives and teaches photography at the University of Houston in Texas. She earned a BA from Hampshire College in Massachusetts and an MFA in photography from Hunter College in New York.

Anderson-Staley’s tintype portrait work was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship and a Puffin Grant. She participated in the Bronx Museum AIM residency program in 2007, the Light Work residency and fellowship in 2010, and the Bakery Photo Collective in Westbrook Maine in 2012. She received a grant in Summer 2011 to prepare a solo exhibition of her series of tintype portraits [hyphen] Americans at Light Work in Syracuse, NY. Her color series about back-to-the-landers in Maine, Off the Grid, was one of five runners-up for the Aperture Portfolio Prize (2009). Off the Grid received the grand prize at the Joyce Elaine Grant exhibition in Denton, TX in 2009 and the Arthur Griffin Award from the Griffin Museum of Photography in 2010. The project was also a finalist for the Duke Center for Documentary Studies/Honickman First Book Prize in 2008. She also recently received funding for her project, Imagined Family Heirlooms via Kickstarter, a crowd-funding website in 2011.

Her photographs are in the permanent collections of the Library of Congress, Akron Art Museum, Cedar Rapids Museum of Art, Portland Museum of Art (Maine), and Museum of Fine Arts-Houston. She was the recipient of a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship, a Puffin Grant, a fellowship from the Howard Foundation and the Carol Crow Fellowship from the Houston Center for Photography. Her work published in a solo issue of Light Work’s Contact Sheet and has been shown at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian, Portland Museum of Art, Akron Art Museum, Bronx Museum of Art, Southeast Museum of Photography and the California Museum of Photography, as well as at a number of galleries around the country.

Anderson-Staley has been making wet plate collodion tintypes and ambrotypes for ten years. Her fine art and editorial work has appeared in a number of magazines, including Photo District News, New York Magazine, Art and Auction, Hemispheres Magazine, Camerawork, Contact Sheet, Conde Nast Traveler and Esquire Russia. Online, her work has been featured on Flak Photo, Conscientious, Fraction Magazine, PetaPixel, Ahorn Magazine and Daylight Magazine. Her series of tintype portraits was published in 2014 under the title On A Wet Bough by Waltz Books.

All images are a one of a kind wet plate collodion on blackened aluminum. Sizes are either 5 x 4", 7 x 5", 10 x 8" or 14 x 11". Pieces range in price from $2000 to $3200, depending on the size.

Images are also available as 20 x 16", 24 x 20" or 46 x 36" pigment print mounted to aluminum with a UV laminate in a total edition of 15. Pieces range in price from $2000 to $5000, depending on size and availability.

Found Unfound: Album: All images are 10 x 10", 14 x 14” and 24 x 24" one of a kind collodion photograms on tin. Pieces range in price from $2400 to $3500 depending on size.

Please call: (312) 266-2350 for prices of specific pieces.
Prices are print only unless otherwise indicated.