Who is popular today?

Magnum photographer Christopher Anderson sensed something poignant when he began creating images of his young children
At the end of his book of images of his daughter, Pia, Christopher Anderson includes a short letter. “Dear Pia,” it begins, “the making of these photographs must seem as natural to you as butter and toast. I probably photographed you every day of your life that I have been with you. There are too many days when travel and work took me away. But, truth be told, we’ve had more conversations about brushing teeth than about creating photos.”
That naturalness was what made Anderson, a celebrated photographer of the frontlines of war and conflict zones in his earlier career, start making portraits of his children. There was no editorialising – that necessity for photojournalists to find a picture that gave an angle to a particular story – he could simply photograph exactly what interested him visually. Anderson’s first book in this mode came after his son Atlas was born in 2008; at the time it did not occur to him that those pictures would become part of his “work”. The more he looked, though, the more he sensed that everything he had done up to that point, on assignment for the Magnum agency in Afghanistan, Iraq, Lebanon, was a preparation for these personal stories. Continue reading...