For years, Christopher Anderson traveled extensively in conflict regions on assignment for the Magnum photo agency. He captured photographs of the everyday lives and sorrows of others before embarking on a very personal project. Away from world events, he documented what was changing in his own life. In 2008, his son Atlas was born, and around the same time his father received a lung cancer diagnosis. Suddenly, the examination of life and death was no longer part of his commissioned work – it took place in Anderson’s own apartment. In sympathetic photographs, he captures his son growing up. Nothing about the images, which he later published as a book titled Son, was planned or posed. Ask Anderson and he simply says the photos “happened” that way: you see little Atlas peering out of a steamy shower stall or sitting sulkily on a tricycle. Anderson renders the special bond parents feel with their children in sunlit photographs devoid of kitsch.
This magic of the everyday also lies in his second book project, Pia, which focuses on Anderson’s younger daughter. Here, too, Anderson succeeds in creating a love letter to his child – a girl looking at the viewer with serious eyes under a pageboy cut. We see Pia standing curiously on a balcony in Paris, playing in the streets, lying in the sun, just being a child. Anderson’s family story now reaches its conclusion with an exhibition at the Robert Morat gallery as part of Berlin Photo Week (02–09.2022). The gallery is offering a first glimpse of Anderson’s final series, which is dedicated to his wife and asks how love evolves when a couple becomes a family. Entitled “Marion”, it will be published as a book in November.
Text: Laura Storfner / Photos: Christopher Anderson / Credit: Robert Morat Galerie, Berlin
Christopher Anderson: Family Trilogy at the Robert Morat Galerie, Linienstr.107, 10115 Berlin–Mitte; map
Until 15.10.2022 Tue–Sat 12–18h, Opening 03.09.2022 18–21h
@robertmorat
