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. Early family photographs from my childhood suddenly took on new meanings after finding Bill, whose image I had monumentalized for more than thirty years. In Found Unfound, the works are presented as an installation. In one part, small tintypes of both men are presented as an intermixed grid. The men look uncannily similar and often difficult to tell apart. In another part of the installation, large portraits of my fathers stare at one another, as if competing for my attention. These giants are out of proportion with reality—the biological father who turned out to be quite ordinary, and Tom, whose eccentricities I have grown to love, and who I would never think of as anything other than Dad. Found Unfound reflects the fundamental paradox of any photograph—that it can reveal a great deal and nothing at all, simultaneously.

-Keliy Anderson-Staley

See you tomorrow at CEG for the opening receptions from 5:00 – 8:00 p.m!