The photographer Christopher Anderson was moving to Europe, going through storage, looking at old pictures—a familiar exercise when packing up apartments. But for Anderson, who’s been deployed to some of the thorniest places on earth, the snaps lining the cardboard box hit a little different.
“I’ve lived multiple photographic lives from my origins as a war photographer, to the pictures of my family, to the pictures of the White House,” he recently told Vanity Fair. “Who was that person that was on a boat with Haitian immigrants in 2000, documenting that journey, who also then walks into Trump’s White House and photographs Stephen Miller? I hate to use the word ‘humbling’ because it’s overused, but yeah, wow—It’s hard to imagine that the kid from West Texas was fortunate enough to be present in some of those moments.”
Christopher Anderson
While rummaging through storage, he also found photos of Jeffrey Epstein, shot in his notorious Upper East Side townhouse, commissioned for a story that never ran. He thought he’d given the only copies to their subject under pressure from his staff. Then the files turned up. He knew they had to be out in the world. No one had ever seen these images before.
Anderson’s newly-released book, Index, reveals a monumental group of subjects that Anderson has photographed during his decades-long career. Early chapters focus on warzones. It starts in Afghanistan, he was there on September 11, 2001—there already, astoundingly. He stayed in the region through the war on terror, and shifted focus, always finding the story: Lebanon, Gaza, Venezuela, Haiti.
Now everyone has a camera in their pocket. Back then, it was just Anderson.
