JONATHAN CHERRY: What one thing today has inspired you?

KELIY ANDERSON-STALEY: I am always thinking about portraits and how I would portray strangers. Just today at the laundromat, I found myself starring at people as I often do. I am fascinated by the way people move, and especially the way they look when they don’t believe they’re being looked at.

JC: What draws you to photography?

KA: Photography allows me to shoot until I feel that I’ve completely exhausted a subject. It also allows several moments of creative intervention - the planning, the shooting, the printing, and the editing. The function of each image can change as the project develops, so photography has a kind of flexibility as a narrative and representational form that isn’t as readily available in other mediums.

JC: What is ‘Off The Grid’ all about?

KA: ‘Off The Grid’ is about several things at once - families who have chosen to live disconnected from the electrical grid (both those who have been living this way for decades and those who have moved off - grid more recently); about the aesthetic character of their improvised homes; about central Maine where life is still defined by wilderness, harsh winters and rugged individuals; and about my own upbringing. In my efforts to document these families and my own, I have deliberately blurred the line between portraiture and autobiography. Although I am interested in the significance of this lifestyle as a kind of response to the global environmental crisis, it of course doesn’t appeal to everyone, and it wouldn’t be a viable solution on a mass scale anyway. So, I am not seeking to romanticize this way of living, but rather to show it as it is.

JC: Can you put the above (first) image into context?

KA: “Tom Shaving” is a portrait of my father shaving in his cabin as he has for years, with a fragment of a mirror and a bowl of water heated on the wood stove. My father’s life in the winter is pretty much confined to ten feet around his wood stove where he reads, writes and makes art. I hoped with this portrait to capture his intellectual character, and his thoughtful approach to even the simplest daily activities. My father built his cabin when I was only two, so my entire life was shaped by his desire to live off the grid, a lifestyle he still maintains thirty years later.

JC: What makes a successful portrait?

KA: The best portrait is one that makes the viewer stop and really look at someone and think about who the person is and how he or she sees him or herself. My favorite portraits reveal and obscure at the same time, maybe allowing us to see a little more than the subject wants to project while still respecting his or her sense of privacy. Although ‘Off The Grid’ is about spaces and the portraits situate people in their environments, they are still formal portraits, and I often ask the individuals to look directly into the camera. Of course there is a long American portrait tradition of individuals standing proudly in front of their homes, on the frontier and elsewhere.

JC: What is next for you photographically?

KA: I am working on a sculptural installation of hundreds of tintype portraits that I have taken over the past few years.

JC: Any other thoughts?

KA: I think a lot of photography recently has tended to ignore the human subject. There has been a lot of emphasis on epic landscapes, urban settings void of people, and sparse horizons. A great deal of that work I find really profound and important, like Edward Burtynsky’s work, but I think it’s important to continue to photograph people, and to not forget the humanistic aspects of the form. Some photographers who are really doing this today include Erika Larsen, Alessandra Sanguinetti, Richard Renaldi and Elinor Carucci.