I was sorry to miss Christopher Anderson talking at the HOST Gallery at the start of last month but I did manage to see his show there, My America which continues until 15 November, and have to say I was a little disappointed. It combined work from the two presidential campaign trails of President George W Bush with pictures from the campaigns of both Barack Obama and John McCain to produce a view of the US political process steeped in its fakery and image creation and the excesses of a kind of patriotic sycophancy (and make-up) but it often failed to catch my interest in the way that his other work has. Perhaps it is a show you really need to be American (or particularly USAmerican) to appreciate. For me there were just too many men in bad ties.
But it is a show that demonstrates his views on objectivity, which you can also hear him talk about in a conversation on the Magnum blog. Anderson doesn’t like to be called a photojournalist, and feels that he functions as “an editorialist rather than a reporter.” In the classic age of photojournalism, the public relied on photojournalists to inform them about what was happening around the world, but now we get the news through TV and other sources, and still photographers have a different function, “not just make a nice picture or not just report an event but in some way comment on an event or offer a perspective on it.”
Although he still feels that he tries to be as honest and as “truthful” as he can, this doesn’t mean being objective but being essentially subjective, to have a point of view and make clear what it is as well as expressing his views clearly through his images.
Of course there is nothing new in this. Many photographers have said similar things over the years. Philip Jones Griffiths made his views absolutely clear “To me, there is no point in pressing the shutter unless you are making some caustic comment on the incongruities of life. That is what photography is all about. It is the only reason for doing it.” He mocked editors who didn’t understand when he asked how they wanted him to approach South East Asia by saying they all they could tell him was that they wanted “temple bells.” But although we may have wider and more complex views than Jones Griffiths, we all know that you have to have a point of view (physical and metaphorical) to make pictures and, more importantly, to know which of the infinite possibilities are worth making.
Anderson’s Magnum page has a slightly different message to the video: “Emotion or feeling is really the only thing about pictures I find interesting. Beyond that it is just a trick.” Look at the pictures there and click on the ‘Major features‘ link at bottom right to see how well he puts that into practice. But there were too many in the HOST show that I at least felt were just a trick.
