Keliy Anderson-Staley

American Photographer | Born: 1977

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.

Source: Catherine Edelman Gallery

Gallery:

Catherine Edelman Gallery

Website:

www.andersonstaley.com

Selected Work:

Selected Video:

Selected Books:

Contact Sheet 163: [hyphen] Americans

Author: Keliy Anderson-Staley

Publisher: Light Work

Year: 2011 - Pages: 48

The series "[hyphen] Americans" by photographer Keliy Anderson-Staley features stunning tintype portraits. The title speaks to the multicultural character of American identities (Irish-American, African-American, etc.). Although a person's heritage might be inferred by looking at their features and clothing, viewers of Anderson-Staley's work are encouraged to, according to the artist, "suspend the kind of thinking that would traditionally assist in decoding these images in the context of American identity politics." Anderson-Staley makes portraits with the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process. She uses wooden view cameras, nineteenth-century brass lenses and chemicals she hand-mixes according to the traditional formulas. In this series she focuses on just one plane in the face--usually just the eyes. The exposures are long, lasting anywhere from ten to sixty seconds, so the images capture a full moment of thought. Because of these characteristics of the process, there is an introspective quality to each portrait, as if each person has been caught looking at him or herself in a mirror. According to the artist, "There are so many technical variables in the process, and there can be flaws and defects that enter the image at every stage of the process, and in many ways this makes it a perfect vehicle for portraits - it is truer to the reality of human imperfection. My images are titled only with the first name of the individual, and I very deliberately try not to draw attention to differences like race, because I want to challenge photography's role in defining difference. At the same time, I want every person I photograph to stand out very sharply as an individual, to be defined as much as possible by the expression on their face." This catalogue includes essays by Jeffrey Hoone.

Off the Grid

Author: Keliy Anderson-Staley

Year: 2009 - Pages: 100

These Maine houses, photographed beautifully by Keliy Anderson-Staley may not represent high end design, but they are still incredibly inspiring � they are all homes to families living off the grid without electricity (except what is generated by the sun), plumbing or phones. The artist herself grew up in one of these cabins in Maine and the images document a radically different (at least to us city dwellers) way of life, but one that isn�t without its charms. I�ve certainly dreamed, from time to time, of packing it all up and leaving the modern world for awhile. Anderson-Staley�s photographs lovingly portray these families for whom, she says in her statement, "their home is their masterpiece."

Source: www.apartmenttherapy.com

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