A knowing subjectivity has always been present in Christopher Anderson’s work. At the beginning of his career, he travelled to “the far corners of the earth”; photographing Haitian refugees trying to sail to America, as well as the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and the violence in the Gaza Strip. But though the landscape in which he worked was often one marred by conflict and human suffering, ultimately he was looking for his own connection to what was happening— “an emotional moment that is pure.”
This focus on the purity of life came to him in its rawest form when he began documenting the days, months and years of his first child’s evolution. He photographed his son, Atlas, as any new parent would; capturing small moments as a way to preserve time. But two years in, he realised that this approach to photography was not merely a part of his practice, it was his practice. “Everything I had been doing up until this point I had been doing to prepare me to make these pictures now,” he says. “And these are the most important pictures that I will make in my lifetime.”
