Interview with Magnum photographer ~ Christopher Anderson

VICE visits Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson at his studio in Brooklyn to talk about some of his past work and the life-changing experience of boarding a handmade boat that sank in the Caribbean. He tells us that his current project of photographing New York is part of his artistic growth and an effort to turn inward. As we follow him on assignment, Anderson explains that he’s not just focused on the task at hand, but also interested in the way his photographs build upon each other through the years.

Advice for Young Photographers from Magnum Photographer Christopher Anderson

"Forget about the profession of being a photographer. First be a photographer and maybe the profession will come after. Don’t be in a rush to pay your rent with your camera. Jimi Hendrix didn’t decide on the career of professional musician before he learned to play guitar. No, he loved music and created something beautiful and that THEN became a profession. Larry Towell, for instance, was not a “professional” photographer until he was already a “famous” photographer. Make the pictures you feel compelled to make and perhaps that will lead to a career. But if you try to make the career first, you will just make shitty pictures that you don’t care about."

~Christopher Anderson
[via Aphotoeditor]

New York Ten Years After 9/11 by Magnum Photographer Chris Anderson

'When The New Yorker magazine commissioned me to create a portfolio of images that could speak to how New York has changed in these ten years, I kept returning to the idea of windows. Windows represent the future. They represent passage and change. They shed light. Through windows we see opportunity and possibility. They sometimes reflect our own selves, and they sometimes act as barriers. In a more concrete way, they are how we New Yorkers physically experience our city. And of course, the idea of windows is directly linked to the two buildings that came down on September 11, 2001. These pictures are connected by the idea of windows. They are my attempt to pay tribute to the resilience of this city'. ~ Chris Anderson

CAPITOLIO ~ By Magnum Photographer Christopher Anderson

Capitolio is (Canadian born Magnum photographer) Christopher Anderson's cinematic journey through the upheavals of contemporary Caracas, Venezuela, in the tradition of such earlier projects as William Klein's New York (1954-55) and Robert Frank's The Americans (1958). It presents a poetic and politicized vision, by one of today's finest documentary photographers, of a city and a country that is ripping apart at the seams under the stress of popular unrest, and 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 current 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; "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.'"

"I sometimes imagine Caracas as a living breathing animal. Obscured by the darkness it appears both violent and sensual, but perhaps it's true nature will only be revealed at the moment it devours me." ~ Christopher Anderson

Video Interview with Magnum Photographer ~ Christopher Anderson