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Matinee: 'Finding Home With Christopher Anderson'
14 January 2017
Saturday matinees long ago let us escape from the ordinary world to the island of the Swiss Family Robinson or the mutinous decks of the Bounty. Why not, we thought, escape the usual fare here with Saturday matinees of our favorite photography films?
So we're pleased to present the 170th in our series of Saturday matinees today: Finding Home With Christopher Anderson.
This four minute clip follows Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson through the streets of Barcelona, Spain, the city he now calls home. But he's not alone. He's carrying a Canon M5 mirrorless, although he doesn't mention it.
He's after something else.
"What I'm looking for in a picture always has something to do with an emotional connection to something," he says. "The feeling of meeting that person, walking that street, standing there in the shoes of that photographer and looking through the eyes of that photographer."
'The beautiful thing about street photography is that it gives you the license to observe.'
Much of his work, he says, has been about "searching for home." And certainly he burst onto the scene that way in 1999 when he boarded a handmade, wooden boat with Haitian refugees sailing to America. The boat, despite being christened the Believe In God, sank. But Anderson's 2,000 the images from the trip would receive the Robert Capa Gold Medal from the Overseas Press Club.
Home is more than a geographic place, he says. It's more an intangible. We follow him through the streets of Barcelona, into the subway and back to the surface as he chases that intangible.
"The beautiful thing about street photography is that it gives you the license to observe," he observes. He makes friends, takes their photograph, takes a selfie with them, parts with smiles.
He feels the rhythm of the place he's in.
"The act of photography, for me, is sort of this interface with what I'm connecting to," he says. It's how he relates to the world around him, his excuse to connect with the world around, the people he shares the street with.
"I still have these moments when I feel kind of just like... so happy to be here," he smiles. Photographing what he calls home.
His work has appeared in National Geographic, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, among others.
He was also New York Magazine's first photographer in residence. At home there too, you might say.