Christopher Anderson

BEHIND THE EYES OF

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON Photographer

Original title: Behind the eyes of Christopher Anderson 2021 Photography Portfolio First edition: April 2021 Lou Noble Editorial design Jimena Caballero Barrios

“Emotion is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting.

Beyond that it is just a trick”

CONTENTS

01

02

Shenzhen

03 Son

04

The Society in the Sky

05 Capitolio

06

A Design For Life

The Joy of Conncection

8

“Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that is is just a trick.”

-Christopher Anderson

9

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

Christopher Anderson was born in Canada in 1970, and taught himself photography. He currently lives and works in New York. He is one of the leaders of the new generation of documentary photographers that is razing the wall between art and documentary photography. Since the beginning in the early 1990s as a ‘war photographer’, Anderson has become recognised for a unique visual language, and has been commissioned by publications from the National Geographic to fashion magazines.

His pictures – such as the ones from a clandestine voyage with 44 illegal Haitian immigrants aboard a crude, wooden boat that sank whilst attempting to sail to America – have been awarded some of photography’s highest honours including the Robert Capa Gold Medal.

Other honours include a nomination for a Pulitzer Prize and the Visa d’Or and Magazine Photographer of the Year (twice). His first monograph, Nonfiction, was published in 2003 and is now out of print. His second book, Capitolio, was released in 2009. He also co-authored two other titles whilst a photographer at the agency VII: WAR (2003) and Rethink (2002). In 2005, Christopher joined Magnum Photos.

Christopher Anderson

The Joy Of Connection The purity of death also presented itself; his father grew increasingly sick at the same time his son turned from baby to boy. “As I was making that work and as I became conscious I was making real pictures, I was reflecting on the very obvious and very universal themes of the joy of new life and the melancholy of the fading of life,” says Anderson.

The crystallisation of this idea has focused his practice and belief in “what is at the heart of a photograph”. “Ultimately the photograph is a reflection of the experience I’m having and a connection I’m having to the subject, whether that’s my family or anything else,” says Anderson.

“But photographing my family helped me understand that better than I could have ever done before.”

12

Christopher Anderson Marion, Pia and Altas. Corsica, France. 2015. © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos

13

The Joy of Connection

Christopher Anderson Pia after a swim.

La Drome. France. 2018. © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos

14

The Joy of Connection

Christopher Anderson Marion and Atlas in a hotel. Shibuya, Tokyo. Japan. 2018.

15

The Joy of Connection

Christopher Anderson Pia playing hide and seek. Corsica, France. 2018.

16

The Joy of Connection

Christopher Anderson Pia playing hide and seek. Corsica, France. 2018.

17

The Joy of Connection

Christopher Anderson Pia after a swim. La Drome. France. 2018. © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos

18

The Joy of Connection

19

Shenzhen Initiated to mark the 70th anniversary of the agency’s founding, the Live Lab program gives photographers the open but time-sensitive brief of creating a wholly new body of work in a specific locale over the course of two weeks, culminating in a group show. The process is open and the public are invited to drop in and watch photographers throughout: debriefing from their day’s shooting, looking through work, putting edits together, discussing the merits of one image over another, playing with sequencing and hanging the work on the walls.

The creative experiment, which was as much about their collaboration as it was about the local area, saw old friends Alex Majoli and Christopher Anderson riffing off one another in what they both liken to the process of making music. “I use the metaphor that we are two jazz players, I play piano and he plays guitar, and we play jazz, following our intuition,” says Majoli. “I think of it as a live jazz jam session. I know my notes, I know my instrument, you know yours, let’s see what we come out with.”

The pair have been friends for nigh-on two

20

decades, and this collaborative project is, for them, the manifestation of ideas sparked over conversations they’ve had over many years. Christopher Anderson explains: “In the last 18 or 20 years that we’ve known each other, through dinners, over drinks, and spending time together with each other’s families, a conversation has been ongoing about art, photography, life, literature, history, everything. To go and make that conversation concrete, become material, in China, was the goal.”

Shenzhen, which was designated as China’s first Special Economic Zone in 1980, is a thriving and rapidly growing city.

At the last count, in 2015, it was home to over 11 million residents. Depicting the essence of the city was a challenge for the photographers. As Majoli explains, “Shenzen is changing, it’s a modern, globalized city and it’s difficult to put that into pictures. It’s there, you see it but it’s difficult to put that into a square or a rectangle.”

“What does this picture mean to you? Do I have this right? What do you see when you see this picture?”

Shenzhen

Christopher Anderson Shenzhen, China. 2017. © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos

24

Shenzhen

Christopher Anderson Shenzhen, China. 2017. © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos

25

Shenzhen

26

Shenzhen

Christopher Anderson Shenzhen, China. 2017. © Christopher Anderson | Magnum Photos

27

“Part of what was happening was a dialogue with other Chinese people, with Shenzhen residents, with locals, about what we were doing, and seeing them respond to what we were doing”

Son Following the birth of his son, Christopher Anderson – who had earned international acclaim for his documenting of conflict zones – stepped away from war photography as his photographs turned towards an intimate reflection of family life, resulting in his book Son.

Son

32

Son

33

The society in the sky As part of a month-long celebration of New York, and the role it has played in Magnum Photos’ history – as well as the working practices of many of the collective’s members – we look at Christopher Anderson’s work on the city’s most elevated residents.

When architect Ernest Flagg designed New York’s Singer Tower, which was completed in 1908, he did so with a sense of careful foreboding about a possible future for the city. He feared the uncontrolled rise of skyscrapers could leave the streets below in the shade as they, like trees in a rainforest, battled upwards towards the sun. His design for the building that would be – for a time – the tallest in New York and the world, attempted to set a standard that would eschew this problem by starting the towering part of the building several stories up. He hoped that this mode of designing skyscrapers with towers limited to one-quarter of a site’s area would become the norm, resulting in a skyline that would be “picturesque, interesting, and beautiful”.

This approach fell out of fashion during the century that followed, as a race for the sky witnessed competitively taller and taller buildings piercing new holes into the New York skyline. The Singer building was taken down manually in 1967 and 68, but has a legacy of being the tallest building

36

in the world to be peacefully demolished.

We cannot know what Flagg might make of the current state of New York architecture, as skyscrapers ambitiously forge into unchartered airspace, but if he had concerns about how skyscrapers might obtrude on street-level life below, one might wonder what he’d make of the new city in the sky with new communities based on a shared altitude.

“It’s lonely at the top, literally,” says Christopher Anderson, reflecting on his assignment exploring the homes of this growing community. His photo essay, which includes some vertigo-inducing shots, looking down at the streets far below, has faint echoes of the work of Magnum stalwart René Burri, who once said, “Whenever there was a high-rise building, I was climbing up and knocked at the door and said, ‘Can I take a picture?’”

Anderson not only looks bravely down, but peers across at the views, documents the orange netting shrouding construction workers, and takes a candid look at the mundanity of everyday life that continues as usual at 800 feet, in offices, restaurants and living rooms, in very much the same way as at ground level, save for the almost unbroken blue of the sky that fills the windows.

Christopher Anderson Window washers on the Bloomberg Tower, formally known as 731 Lexington Avenue. Opened in 2004

37

38

39

40

Christopher Anderson Yoga class at the top of 28 Liberty Street, formerly known as One Chase

41

Capitolio Christopher Anderson’s study of Caracas, Venezuela depicts a poetic and politicized vision of a city ripping apart with popular unrest. In the tradition of such earlier projects as William Klein’s New York (1954-55) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), documentary photographer Christopher Anderson’s exploration of Caracas, Venezuela, brings to light the plight of a city and a country whose turmoil remains largely unreported by Western media.No stranger to such fraught situations (he covered the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel from its inception), Anderson notates the country’s incongruities, where the violent and the sensual intermingle chaotically.

“The word ‘Capitolio’ refers to the domed building that houses a government,” writes Anderson, elaborating on the title of this volume. He continues, “Here, the city of Caracas, Venezuela, is itself a metaphorical Capitolio building. The decaying Modernist architecture, with a jungle growing through the cracks, becomes the walls of this building and the violent streets become the corridors where the human drama plays itself out in what President Hugo Chavez called a ‘revolution’.”

42

43

“Emotion is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting.

Beyond that it is just a trick”

44

Christopher Anderson Yoga class at the top of 28 Liberty Street, formerly known as One Chase Manhattan Plaza.

Christopher Anderson Police in front of Trump Tower. NYC. USA. 2017..

46

Christopher Anderson Police in front of Trump Tower. NYC. USA. 2017..

47

A design for life

48

“Daily routine? Photographers don’t have daily routines,” exclaims Christopher Anderson, when asked about his new life in Barcelona. With a base in New York City and a family home in Spain, the photographer travels extensively for his work.

49

Christopher Anderson Holiday in Palamós, Spain. 2017. © Christopher

50

Christopher Anderson Holiday in Palamós, Spain. 2017. © Christopher

51

BOOKS

BUY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON´S BOOKS 53