The Photography of Andy Anderson: Part II
Anderson grew up in Orlando, Florida and, after high school, received a one-year scholarship in journalism at a local com- munity college. While he enjoyed writing, he found it too difficult to consider as a career, and entered the Air Force at age 21. Not an unlikely career given that he describes his father as the Great Santini, a strict disciplinarian given to bouncing quarters off the bed to see if it’d been properly made. That drive toward perfectionism would come into play in his future career.
“I started taking pictures when I was in the Air Force as a fire fighter, for magazines and things like that,” says Anderson. As he was nearing the end of his military career, one that had taken him to Honduras and Saudi Arabia among other hot spots, he began to photograph more seriously and worked on developing his business. “I picked up a camera and I just started taking pictures of fishing, people…It was instantaneous. It just felt right to me,” Anderson explains.
Anderson could be photography’s Cinderella story. Inspired by a John Huet photograph he found in a copy of Communication Arts, he was emboldened to become a photographer himself for his second career. Years later, Huet, moved by Anderson’s work, invited him to be one of twelve select photographers to document the Salt Lake City Olympics with access unprecedented since Leni Riefenstahl and the 1936 Berlin Summer Games.
“To be really good at photography, you have to be obsessed with it,” he claims. “Photography is a craft for me.” Anderson says.
He resists being identified as a photographer of masculine images, although he does capture nature, and man in nature in such an uncontrived fashion, that it’s impossible not to think of his landscapes, and those who people them, as anything but heroic. But, he can just as easily capture Julia “Butterfly” Hill, as radiant as a wood fairy in the midst of a towering forest of trees, much like the one she chose to call home for 738 days to protect it.
He is drawn to the things that formed America and made it great, and to the rugged iconoclastic individuals who are the heart and soul of this country. Places make an impact on him; he has trouble detaching—often revisiting favorite locales and people—“I always come back to people that are remnants of days gone by. As we move into the new millennium and jobs are going away and becoming more digitized, it’s not the same as it used to be,” he says, lamenting the loss of true craft. “I want to celebrate that. I don’t want to demoralize that and make it feel less than it visually is, because almost in an obsessive way, I’m trying to capture this before it’s all gone.
Anderson interview written by Anne Telford for Communication Arts, May/June 2004
For further information, please visit: andyandersonphoto.com
Lone River Productions / Email: andy@andyandersonphoto.com / Phone: 208.587-3161]]>
