INTERVIEW: “A Conversation with Christopher Anderson” (2012)

I’ve spent the last fifteen years with the title of “War photographer”, going to the other ends of the earth, to photographs stories of other people, looking for photographic intimacy from people that I didn’t know. In Afghanistan, which could not be further away from what I grew up in, which was milk and toast Texas. My father was an evangelical preacher, and I grew up in a very conservative and religious environment. My family is not right wing, born again, or that kind of thing, but the environment, the town, the culture that I grew up in were conservative, and I became a photographer, really, to escape that.

Then all of sudden you have a child, which is a crazy experience, because it is at the same time the most intimate and unique experience a person can have, and it is also the most common and universal experience a person can have. Then I was having this internal dialogue: “I’ve been going off to Afghanistan, and now I’ve come the full circle, where I’m not running away from home anymore, I want to be at my home. I want to understand myself through my family”.