Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles CHRISTOPHER ANDERSON: I'm still endlessly fascinated by what is that magic dust that, sprinkled on a certain image, makes it more powerful than another image? It goes so far beyond composition and lighting all those things. But yet, it's kind of all those things mixed together. And that's the essence of what is interesting about photography to me. Oh man, I love when the city looks like that. My name is Christopher Anderson, full member in Magnum. There was a certain idea, the notion that this camera could represent for me, especially growing up in a small town in Texas. This little machine represented a way out. So there was that sense of having an idea of wanting to do something with this. But what that really meant of being a professional-- no. When I got out of university, I was planning to go into academia. But a friend of my family got me a job in "The Dallas Morning News" printing pictures and developing film there. I did that as a summer job, and I knew then I wanted to be a photographer somehow. And I was never going to go back to academia. I got really lucky. Someone gave me a job to take pictures before I even really understood that there was a job description of professional photographer. I had no formal training. I really didn't know how to work a camera. I certainly had no journalism training. I became this professional and learned on the job. And I spent many years just trying to do my job as good as I could do it before I ever start really thinking about putting very basic questions to myself, like what is a photograph? And what do I want my photographs to represent? Those sort of questions came to me much later. Here's the Haiti boat story-- June 18, 2000. In Haiti, this writer and I-- Michael Finkel-- met this guy in Haiti who told us an amazing story about trying to get on a boat and sail to the United States. We got on one of these boats-- 44 Haitians plus myself and the writer. And we set sail. And a few days later, we started sinking. That moment in the boat when we realized that we were sinking--- up until that point, I hadn't taken many photographs. And the guy we were with, David, says, Chris, you'd better start taking pictures now. We're going to be dead in 45 minutes. Without thinking too much about it, I begin making photographs, as we were literally saying goodbye to each other. This is the guy, David. That was the moment we realized we were sinking. You can see the water coming in from the inside of the boat there. And later on, after that, I thought about that moment over and over again, asking myself the question, why make photographs that I assumed no one would see? And the only answer that I could come up with was that the actual act of making pictures, photography in and of itself, it had as much to do for me about explaining the world to myself as it did explaining it to someone else. The very act of photography was part of how I understood things. It crystallized the notion, the idea of what it was I thought about photography and what I wanted to do with pictures. It changed everything. And from that point, I guess editors thought that I was looking for danger and was willing to go through some discomfort. So I started getting offers to do the obvious thing, which is go to wars. And that set about-- the next several years was this kind of blur from Israel, Palestine to Lebanon to Africa to Iraq, Afghanistan. But with a clear idea of what I wanted the pictures to be about. I wanted to find a way for someone to feel what it was that I experienced-- an emotional quality that cut through all the ideas of facts and journalism, but went straight to something else, which is an emotional truth. I don't know if I made a conscious decision to stop doing wars or not. Part of it's I had a child. One skill set that I had in doing that kind of work was that I was able to remain relatively calm in those situations. And now, I felt like I didn't trust how I would react. But there's also the other side of me, which is that, for me, there was never this oh, I used to be that and now I've become this. It's just we grow and we change as human beings. So even from a creative standpoint, I'm taken in different directions now-- portraits, for instance. And really looking at why I like some portraits-- why some portraiture is compelling and others are not. And me, not coming from any formal, technical training of photography, forcing myself to learn some of those things in order to pull off what it is that I want to photograph. Yeah, I kind of like those challenges. [INAUDIBLE]. [PRETEND MONSTER GROWL] [LAUGHING] What did you have? What did I have? Mmhm. What do you mean, what did I have? No, a present. A present? Mmhm. If I have a present? Mmhm. The son project-- the photographs of my son and my father-- really happened quite organically in the sense that I had a kid. It started like any father taking pictures of their kid. At about the same time, my father became ill. And so I was thinking about very obvious themes of the cycles of life and death. And that's the weird thing about parenthood-- is completely universal and mundane. And at the same time, it's completely unique and intimate and special. And so I began photographing my father and my son, and at the beginning, just without thinking about it. And it started to dawn on me that what I was seeing in the pictures was that quality that I felt like I'd been on a search for since I first started using a camera. And that everything that I had photographed up until that point was as if it were just some sort of preparation to bring me to that point, to provide me with the tools or the insight or whatever it was in order to make those pictures. And that that was my life's work. It was very quick, also, because that particular set of pictures loses its magic the moment that it becomes a conscious work. Flash card, camera, lenses, extra battery. See, I always want to take a picture right here. And I can't. I'd have to park my car. The work I'm doing now with "New York Magazine," it's a big change for me, because I'm staying mostly at home to do it after years of having worked mostly in strange places around the world. Check this out, this old Bronx courthouse that's just bricked up and empty. And also, for me, it is an extension of what the son work was. The son photographs are this first time where I look at my own world, at this city in which I live, and the people that I live with in this city. And so in that sense, the work retains this personal edge to it, this personal connection-- my world of New York and my friendships with other photographers and artists and writers. And it's part of this collective experience that we're having now that I'm privileged enough to get to photograph in a concentrated way. Yeah, I don't know Spanish Harlem as well as I would like to.