When asked about the last time he made a photograph that surprised him, Christopher Anderson goes quiet. 'You're going to make me cry,' he says, and he sounds like he means it. It hasn't happened in a while. For someone who has spent the better part of three decades with a camera in his hand, that admission is not a small one. But what follows matters more than the admission itself. Making new book Index, he says, has pulled him back somewhere. 'I feel ready to start making real pictures again. I don't know exactly what it's going to be, but I feel ready to be open to that now.'
What connects Anderson's work across time is not subject matter but perspective. His presence in the image is the constant, whether he's in a conflict zone, the Oval Office or his own kitchen. Born in Canada and raised in west Texas, he first gained international recognition in 1999 when he boarded a small wooden boat with 44 Haitian immigrants attempting to sail to America. The boat sank in the Caribbean, and the photographs earned him the Robert Capa Gold Medal in 2000.
What followed was years of conflict work and magazine commissions, including a tenure shooting for New York Magazine. Becoming a father in 2008 led to an intensely personal body of work about his family, published across three books: Son, Pia and Marion. He now lives in Paris, where he has been based since 2019. Last December, his portraits of the Trump administration for Vanity Fair brought his work to an audience far beyond the photography world. Index, published by Stanley/Barker, is where much of this work now sits together for the first time.
The idea was not a retrospective, with all the tidiness that such curation implies, but something closer to the experience of opening boxes in a studio and finding things you'd forgotten you'd made. Eleven volumes, placed in deliberate proximity: photojournalism, portraiture, family, street photography, selfies. The ghost of William Eggleston's The Democratic Forest (his own ten-volume exercise in photographing without hierarchy, made across the 1980s) is somewhere in the background. Anderson didn't set out to invoke it, he says, but acknowledges the kinship. 'There is a little bit of that idea. A lot of these photographs are the constant act of seeing.'
Not every volume announces itself. The cars – interiors shot in passing, with no particular reason attached – are closer to a reflex than a project. 'There's not really a reason to photograph them. It's sort of a compulsive action,' he says. He talks about the search for patterns, about marking his place in time, a kind of geotagging. Emotional coordinates rather than aesthetic statements. In that sense, they are perhaps not so different from the rest of his personal work; the same impulse, finding different surfaces.
The White House volume is a different story. He had gone in with a journalist's brief, to photograph honestly, without flattery or the smoothing instincts of celebrity portraiture. The internet read it as a provocation. Images became memes, political ammunition, evidence of intent he hadn't had. He wasn't rattled so much as fascinated. 'I never could imagine that the pictures would jump the guardrails the way they did,' he says. He's long been accustomed to images taking on lives of their own once published, but nothing had prepared him for that particular velocity. The approach itself was nothing new; he'd been making political portraits this way since his 2014 book Stump – close, unretouched, unsparing. What the reaction revealed, he suggests, is less about the photographs than about how completely we have stopped expecting to see politicians as they actually are.
Going back through his archive for Index, Anderson kept finding absences. Moments he'd been present for and never photographed, because at the time his eye was too selective, too ruled by ideas about light or composition or what constituted a worthy image. 'I just wish I had a picture of that thing, regardless of how nice the light was.' The conclusion he draws is not complicated: photograph everything. Not because everything is equally beautiful, but because you don't yet know what will matter, or when. 'It's all important in the end.'
The book also includes an imagined conversation with Werner Herzog, which Anderson refers to in passing as 'the fake interview'. It articulates something he returns to in conversation too: that an archive is not a fixed thing. Meanings shift. Images that seemed unremarkable at the time begin to hold something that wasn't legible yet. He compares photographs to wine, for the way they keep transforming in the bottle.
'I long for being in love with photography the way I used to be,' he says. The past tense is there, but so is something else. Not nostalgia exactly, more like hunger. He doesn't know what comes next; perhaps only that he's ready to be surprised again.