CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON

Presenter, 2011

“The photographs in Son are simple pictures of my family made during the first two years of my son’s life. At the same time that I was experiencing the intense joy of new life, my father was diagnosed with lung cancer. It’s fair to say that I found myself reflecting on obvious themes of life and death. Through my son, my role as the son took on new meaning and my senses were hypertuned to the evidence of my own life passing. Then these photographs just sort of happened. They are a record of love and a reflection on the seasonal nature of life.”
–Christopher Anderson

Initially working in color, Christopher Anderson began photographing a wide range of subjects for magazines. In 1996, he became a contract photographer for “U.S. News and World Report” where he began documenting social issues such as the effects of Russia’s economic crisis, Afghan refugees in Pakistan and, more recently, the election of Evo Morales in Bolivia. In 1999, Anderson boarded a small boat with 44 Haitian immigrants trying to sail to the United States. The experience would significantly change his work to focus on what he often thought of as experiential journalism. Working now in B&W, Anderson was honored with the Robert Capa Gold Medal Award. Later that year, he photographed the stone throwers of Gaza, and was named Kodak’s “Young Photographer of the Year”. He would go on to spend the next several years photographing extensively in conflict zones such as Iraq, Afghanistan and Lebanon including following the first company of American soldiers to enter Baghdad in 2003. Later that year he published his first monograph, Nonfiction. In 2004, Anderson began following the “revolution” of Hugo Chavez in Venezuela. This work would become his second book, Capitolio (published in 2009) and is the culmination of four years of photographs.

He joined the VII Agency in 2002, and became a Magnum nominee in 2005 and member in 2010. He has served as a contract photographer for Newsweek magazine since 2005.