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He was born in Canada, in 1970, and grew up in Texas, where he studied anthropology, but chose to direct his career as a photographer collaborating for different local newspapers.
Inevitably, Christopher Anderson's life changed when in 1999 he risked his life on a small wooden boat.
It was called
Believe in God
and
was carrying 44 refugees from Haiti who were eager to start a new life in the US A few days after setting sail, the boat capsized.
They were rescued by a coast guard.
The striking graphic document,
Desperate Passage
, collected during those days by the photographer, earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal.
After the attacks of September 11 would arrive, curiosity and the need to understand the world led the photographer to the areas of greatest conflict.
His sensitivity when it comes to capturing the pain, violence and misery that barbarism drags consolidated this member of the Magnum agency as one of the most relevant figures in documentary photography.
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker (Christopher Anderson/ Magnum Pho)
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker (Christopher Anderson)
Image belonging to the photobook 'Marion', by Christopher Anderson, published by Stanley / Barker.
Christopher Anderson / Courtesy Stanley Barker
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
In 2008, another key event turned his life around: the birth of his first child made him stop putting his life at risk and began to focus his gaze on issues closer to his personal experience.
Thus, in a few years, Atlas, her eldest son, became the protagonist of a photobook,
Son (2013)
.
Then came Pia, who in 2021 went on to occupy the pages of the photographer's next publication, titled with the girl's short name.
Marion
closes this intimate trilogy, a declaration of love to his wife, the graphic editor Marion Durand, also conceived through experience and the pleasure of looking.
“I couldn't care less about the idea of inspiration or the idea of creation.
I would never use the word muse”, writes the photographer in a text that includes the monograph.
"The war served as a preparation for taking the photographs I take today," Anderson said in a telephone conversation.
“All the feelings I experienced during my time in those wars shaped the way I look at my family, and with this appreciation came a better understanding of myself.
Taking pictures of my family I found my voice”.
Marion
's simple and direct design
follows the pattern of the author's previous books.
“There is a design that is already within photography itself, and it is this that must resonate”, points out the photographer, always suspicious of anything that is accompanied by an excess in his presentation.
The simpler the layout, the more the theme stands out and the reader receives it more strongly.
Thus, Anderson introduces us to the daily life of his partner, bathed in bursts of light and a sensual use of colour.
Page after page, Marion's presence becomes so powerful that, even in those images in which she is absent, the reader believes they perceive her trace, hear her footsteps and hear her voice.
They are images full of intensity —what the author most identifies with in his work— but also of beauty, where the everyday ceases to be for an instant and reaches the sublime.
“I had never thought of a definition of beauty”, warns the photographer, “but if I have to think of one, it would not have to do with what is witnessed but with what is experienced.
And again, I think it could be related to the way I found my voice in portraying my family.
I wasn't looking for beauty, I was experiencing it."
Thus,
Marion
is presented not only as a poem about time but also as the testimony of the author's own experience and verification of history.
And one wonders how much of Marion is in each photograph and how much of its author.
“When my wife first saw the book, she said that the images of her made her feel seen and the text made her feel heard,” recalls the photographer.
“When people ask her about her involvement and how comfortable or uncomfortable she felt, the answer has always been the same: I knew it was necessary for me to take these photographs.
It is evident that without her these images would not exist”.
Much of the photographer's work revolves around the relationship between the subject and the photographer, something that is very evident in
Pia,
where the images reflect the relationship between a father and a daughter as well as a collaboration in which over time the protagonist takes control of her character.
However, the exhibition of this intimate part of the photographer's life implies a duality and is both uncomfortable and absolutely complacent for the author.
“In the idea of these photographs there is proof of something that for some reason I have needed to express to my wife and my family, or perhaps to myself”, acknowledges Anderson.
“We certainly don't believe in governments, many of us don't believe in the Church either, and we definitely don't trust banks.
The family still has pull.
And it is a really interesting place”, assured the photographer Larry Sultan, author of the most cornered
Pictures from Home
,
while pointing to the family as “one of the most complex and bewildering institutions”, and even so as “the last institution in which Most of us believe."
“I would say the last and the only one”, Anderson qualifies.
“Although in different ways, I think we all believe in it.
The family is something completely universal and at the same time absolutely unique.
In one way or another, we all have a family experience.
Whether we like our family or not, we all have a bond with it."
My Husband
is another photobook whose family theme served its author, the Japanese photographer Tokuko Ushioda, to shape her look.
It brings together a series of 156 images that remained forgotten in a room for four decades, and has received an honorable mention from the jury of the 2022 Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation Awards. Conceived in two volumes, the first shows the images taken by the photographer with a medium format camera while the second contains snapshots taken with a 35mm compact camera.
As with Anderson, life and art become one for Ushioda, who during the period from the birth of her daughter, Maho-chan, until she started college, strove to document her surroundings. innermost.
Although, at first, this material was intended to be a book about the girl, she would end up adopting a title that gives priority to the figure of her husband, also a photographer Shinzo Shimao.
But, in any case, in its completion
From her My Husband
it says more about the author's life during that time than about her husband or her daughter.
The empty and silent rooms predominate where the objects lead us to feel the presence of their inhabitants and in whose stillness one can appreciate the rhythm with which the photographer, once freed from her domestic chores, prepared to give shape to her work.
A frank and direct look at her most intimate surroundings, as severe as warm and melancholic.
Image from the photobook 'My Husband', by Tokuko Ishioda, published by Torch Press.Tokuko Ishioda / Courtesy Torch Press
Little Maho-chan is also the eponymous protagonist of the photobook that Shimao dedicated to her in 2001,
Maho-chan
(Osiris), the photographs were taken in the same period as those of
My Husband
and with a 35mm camera.
Decades later she wrote
Ella maho-chan no Ie
(Maho-chan's House)
(WAVE Shuppan, 2007), where she recalled the chaos that reigned in her house when her mother was away.
Ushioda was born in 1940, the same year as Daido Moriyama and Nobuyoshi Araki.
The beginnings of her career were hampered both by her status as a
freelancer
and as a woman.
She already in her first exhibition, in 1976, her titled
Hohoemi no Tej
(Handcuffed by a smile)
, the author alluded to the imposition of women in Japan to have to smile continuously.
Thus, shortly after and after giving birth to her daughter, the photographer was forced to develop her career in the confines of the home.
And while Araki published
Yoko, my love
and laid the foundations of what he himself calls the "fictionalized self" (a style that mixes reality with fiction), Ushioda remained at home, in an environment that was delimited from the outside world. by the presence of the railing on the stairs of the western-style house where he lived with his family.
“For someone who has taken photographs for many years, living a life that involves a constant back and forth between taking pictures and not taking pictures, the act of taking pictures of loved ones takes on a meaning similar to sacrificing the time one has reserved for oneself. himself and his own memories, in the interest of photography”, writes the photographer Yurie Nagashima in one of the texts included in the monograph.
"The scenes depicted are ordinary, but they represent an archive of familiar moments that can never be repeated again."
Moments that somehow would not exist without the intention of photographing.
'
Marion
'.
Christopher Anderson.
Stanley/Barker.
160 pages.
47.95 euro.
'
My Husband'.
Tokuko Ushioda.
Torch Press.
Book 1;
122 pages.
Book 2: 76 pages.
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