Michael Anderson

Michael Anderson has been making photographs for over 50 years.

The worst thing that can happen to a picture (regardless of its medium) is to be greeted with indifference. Only slightly less awful is a superficial glance. Of course, it's always good with people think a picture is beautiful - but what Michael really wants to do is produce pictures that make people stop and look. He wants people to engage with the pictures, to meet them halfway, to apply their own intelligence and way of seeing, and then develop their own individual perception of what the pictures are about.

One way he does this is to deliberately play with people's expectations. Photographs are supposed to be of something. But it's not always clear what some of his pictures are of. (Some landscapes are border-line abstract, and most of the abstract pictures are straight, relatively un-manipulated photographs.) The tension between the expectation (of something) and the reality (what is it?) gives people a reason to look at many of these images.

A relatively recent interest has been people. The portraits in this section are mostly of real people, some casual, others less so.