NON FICTION by Christopher Anderson

de.MO., 2004, First edition, Unpaginated, 7 1/4" X 7 3/4", Softcover in clamshell box

Fine in very good clamshell box

In November 2002, war photographer Christopher Anderson had a chance encounter with a Holga, a plastic toy camera manufactured in China. Expecting it to be nothing more than a game, Anderson quickly found a kind of freedom with the plastic camera that differed greatly from his usual work as a war photographer.

“My work requires a certain intellectual engagement in trying to visually communicate information both literal and emotional. But I found something very different with this camera. Because it’s a toy, I couldn’t control it the way I normally would. I couldn’t take pictures that were the result of an engaged thought process, because it was physically impossible with this camera,” explains Anderson. Instead, he found himself reacting and taking pictures in a much more instinctive way. “The pictures that I was taking were free of meaning or message and were much more revealing about how I reacted to scenes that I encountered while going about my life,” he adds.

Anderson used the plastic camera for a period of eight months, and his photographs were guided solely by emotion and intuition.