Keliy Anderson-Staley earned a solo exhibition in the East Gallery at Texas Woman’s University by going home again.

Courtesy photo/Keliy Anderson-Staley

Keliy Anderson-Staley’s Tom’s Cabin in Winter, Guilford, Maine catches some of the hallmarks of homesteading life: lots of windows to let in light and heat in this “off-the-grid” cabin, stacks of cord wood at the ready for fuel and heating and plenty of gardening tools.

View larger More photos Photo store

Anderson-Staley, a Manhattan photographer, traveled to a wooded area in Maine where a small community of homesteaders still carve out an American life in an old-fashioned way. They live “off the grid,” meaning they don’t rely on public utilities for electricity or plumbing.

Anderson-Staley spent her childhood in a log cabin her father built in the Maine community. Her photo project of the community today earned her the Solo Show Award for the eighth annual Joyce Elaine Grant Photography Exhibition. The award meant she’d have a solo exhibit during the ninth annual Joyce Elaine Grant show, which opened Tuesday.

“Off the Grid” is a series of photographs Anderson-Staley took during visits back to Maine. They capture the rustic homes, the landscape and the residents throughout the seasons. She catches them in mundane moments — shaving, reading, playing. The photographer said she didn’t mean to shoot the series as a cohesive project until she started referring to it as “Off the Grid.”

It’s a process for a family to intentionally disconnect from the modern urban and suburban infrastructure, with government-tended water and sewer systems and electricity.

“Both my parents claim it was the other one who decided to move off the grid, but either way, we moved to Maine in 1980 when I was 2 years old,” Anderson-Staley said. “For a year or two we lived in an old ‘garage’ on about 70 acres while my father and a few of his friends built a log cabin. Although my parents are divorced and live separately, they are still both off the grid.”

Denton residents already might be familiar with what it means to live off the grid because of Denton County’s Whitehawk community — which began as an eco-friendly community but later made some concessions — and Rainbow Valley, a tiny Sanger community that began as an off-the-grid neighborhood of dome houses in the 1970s.

Courtesy photos/Keliy Anderson-Staley

Part of Keliy Anderson-Staley’s project was to show how living “off the grid” affects teenagers, like the subject of Katrina in the Kitchen, Dover-Foxcroft, Maine. While growing up, Anderson-Staley’s family lived in a log cabin still standing in the Maine homesteading

View larger More photos Photo store

Anderson-Staley said she often returns to Maine, in contrast to the super-urban bustle of her current home, Manhattan.

“I try to visit my family a few times a year, but in terms of the project, I’ve wanted to photograph in all four seasons to give the fullest picture of life there,” she said. “Whenever I go up I visit as many of the families as I can and try to visit at least one new family. There are a number of younger people who continue to move to the Maine woods, and I have met more as I’ve expanded the project geographically.”

On her visits to the woods, Anderson-Staley was struck by the people and their resourcefulness. That’s where she saw a photography series. The homesteaders don’t choose a house from six floor plans in a planned community. They continually craft a home that makes way for their habits, their needs and their tastes.

“I find the strange, improvised structures everyone builds fascinating — not just the cabins, but the outbuildings and root cellars,” she said. “None of them is a professional carpenter, but they’ve learned to work with wood, and taught themselves a variety of skills. I like the idiosyncrasies of each place, the unique stamp the families put on their homes.”

Some of the residents do choose to connect to the technologically saturated world, either by turning on a charged cellphone for an hour each week, or setting up solar panels that charge laptop computers. Anderson-Staley’s family didn’t have a phone until she was 17.

“There is a strong sense of family and community, but there is also a great deal of loneliness and isolation,” she said. “Especially in the winter, people stay in their cabins for weeks at a time. Many of the children are home-schooled. This can make for strong family relationships, but it can also be really difficult for teenagers growing up and couples on the rocks. I also wouldn’t want people to come away assuming that technology hasn’t made it into these homes either.”

Courtesy photos/Keliy Anderson-Staley

Tom Shaving, Guilford, Maine is one of a series of photographs in “Off the Grid,” a solo exhibition by Manhattan photographer Keliy Anderson-Staley.

View larger More photos Photo store

A lot of photographers would prepare for such an assignment as if they were headed out on a National Geographic assignment. They’d have their visitors’ eyes sighted for the exotic and the artful. That wasn’t Anderson-Staley’s process.

“I’ve always seen myself as coming from this place, and because I grew up this way, there is really nothing exotic about it for me. In fact, when I go to visit my father, it is very easy to fall back into the routine of using the outhouse, feeding the wood stove, pumping water for dishes. So for me there has always been a kind of autobiographical impulse — a desire to look at the more mundane aspects of living this way,” she said. “A few of these families watched me grow up, so I think they sometimes think it’s funny that I’ve come back from the city to photograph them. I think they are interested in seeing how I represent them.”

There’s one way in which Anderson-Staley approaches the work as a cultural anthropologist.

“I am always cautious when I approach new families,” she said. “I want to put them at ease and to assure them that I don’t intend to exoticize them, and that I am as interested in preserving their privacy as they are.”

In her photographs, Anderson-Staley shows that the residents of this community aren’t all left-leaning environmentalists. Some are, but some have gone off the grid as a way to live out evangelical Christian ethics. Other residents have other, more mysterious reasons for leaving the ease of suburban life.

“It is the lifestyle that holds them together,” she said. “There is no coherent community, though. There are many separate centers. Some of the families, such as my own, belong to the Unitarian church, so there is a community gathered around that common experience.”

American Unitarian Universalists are religious liberals descended from Puritan Christianity who claim stewardship of the Earth and conservation as important spiritual ethics.

“Many of the families are aware of each other, and have met each other over the years,” Anderson-Staley said. “They all moved to Maine independently and have sought each other out. When they first came to the area 35 or 30 years ago, there was a sense that they were outsiders, and what they were trying to do was hard. So, although they were coming for different reasons, they needed to rely on each other’s collective wisdom. That having been said, any ‘community’ is very loose and can withstand long periods of time without any kind of contact between people.”

LUCINDA BREEDING can be reached at 940-566-6877. Her e-mail address is cbreeding@dentonrc.com .

What: A solo photography exhibition by Keliy Anderson-Staley

When: Gallery hours are 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday, and on weekends by appointment. The exhibit runs through Feb. 17.

Where: East Gallery, located on the first floor of the TWU Fine Arts Building, at Oakland Street and Pioneer Circle

Details: Admission is free. For a weekend appointment, call 940-898-2530.