Published by Light Work in 2011 as Contact Sheet number 163, Keliy Anderson-Staley’s [hyphen] Americans brings together more than forty black-and-white portraits concerned with the terms by which American identity is seen and classified. Its title invokes compound descriptions such as Irish-American or African-American, yet the photographs decline to turn those categories into explanatory captions. Each sitter is identified only by a first name, shifting attention from presumed ancestry toward the particular presence of a face.

Anderson-Staley made the portraits as tintypes using the nineteenth-century wet-plate collodion process. Working with wooden view cameras, period brass lenses, and chemistry mixed from traditional formulas, she accepts a method in which irregularities can arise at every stage. The shallow plane of focus often settles on the eyes, while exposures lasting from ten to sixty seconds require sitters to inhabit the image rather than merely meet an instant. The resulting expressions carry concentration, stillness, and the pressure of elapsed time.

The historical process is not employed as nostalgia. Its material variability becomes part of the project’s argument against photography as a supposedly neutral instrument for defining human difference. Clothing and facial features may invite assumptions about heritage, but Anderson-Staley asks the viewer to suspend that reflex. The portraits hold two propositions in tension: that race and cultural affiliation should not predetermine interpretation, and that every sitter should remain unmistakably individual.

This first-edition, 48-page paperback also includes text by Jeffrey Hoone. For a photobook collection, its significance lies in the compact alignment of process and subject: an early photographic technology is redirected toward a contemporary examination of multicultural America. Rather than offering a census of social types, [hyphen] Americans preserves a sustained encounter with named individuals—and a precise example of portraiture questioning the very classifications it has historically helped to construct.