But today, Anderson is best known not for his war work, nor his portraiture. Rather, his contemporary practice is defined by his intimate documentation of becoming a father. Anderson’s first son, Atlas, was born in 2008 in a loft apartment of a building in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, known as the Kibbutz (Anderson describes it as “one step up from a squat”). The Kibbutz was known as a haven for artists, “back when Williamsburg was a place where artists could still live.” His apartment was above a sculptor’s studio, and fellow photographers Tim Hetherington, Alex Majoli, Stanley Greene and Thomas Dworzak also spent stints in the building.
In particular, Anderson struck up a close relationship with Hetherington. They were the same age, covered the same wars, and had started to feel comparably uncomfortable about the ethics and pursuit of war reporting. When Hetherington died after being hit by shrapnel from a mortar fired by troops loyal to Colonel Gaddafi in Misrata, Libya, in 2011, it hit Anderson hard. Atlas, at the time, was a vivacious toddler. These dual experiences – the responsibilities of fatherhood coupled with the pain of losing a friend to a senseless moment of violence – convinced Anderson to stop photographing conflict zones. He turned his back on the work that made his name, and he turned his lens to Atlas. We saw this profound change in Anderson’s practice in 2013, when he published the photobook SON.
“Everything else I had photographed up to that point was just to prepare me to make these pictures”
– Christopher Anderson
SON is a love letter to Atlas, who was five when the book was published; to Atlas’s mother and Anderson’s wife, Marion Durand, who worked at a photo editor at Newsweek; and to Anderson’s father, Lynn, who was, at the time, struggling with a cancer diagnosis. Although Anderson himself barely features, the book is also a self-portrait: a chronicle of a man who built an identity around historic war photography, only to truly “find” himself in the ordinary, everyday challenges of being a parent, husband and son.
“Everything else I had photographed up to that point,” he says, “was just to prepare me to make these pictures. I realised that the smallest gesture from my son, in the most quiet, still moments, had the capacity to contain more power than anything I had witnessed before.”