Book Review: Capitolio by Christopher Anderson

Christopher Anderson's Capitolio is the first photobook designed specifically for iPad and iPhone. So before I address the work, a word about the format. Does the portable screen enhance or diminish the photographic experience? Is the full potential of the digital format used?

I was a reluctant convert to digital cameras from the analogue world of photography, and to this day I regularly tweet at my local repertory movie house to make sure they're showing a 35mm print. Physical film is important to me. Digital formats may not suit most photobooks — to think of one fairly recent example, the photobook I reviewed last week, Jason Fulford’s Raising Frogs for $$$, makes the most *sense* as a strikingly bound physical object.

But the body of work in Capitolio is well represented by its digital format. Originally produced in a print edition in 2009, it’s a striking app laid out in wide-screen format, and the swiping navigation is sympathetic to the photographer's intention that these photos make up a particular cinematic sequence. The stark, high contrast black and white images may not be what one would expect from the first iPad photobook, but the chosen tonal palette is somewhat limited by design, and thus lends itself well to digital reproduction. (Daido Moriyama’s grainy, hi-constrast images would work well in this format; less so the more subtle tones of a Eugene Atget, a catalog of whose works is available as an eBook (page layouts straight from the print edition, so not designed specifically for tablet) from the Moma Books app.)

Anyway, what of the work? Anderson shot this project in Caracas, Venezuela, in the shadow of a specific domed building or Capitolio, but he sees Caracas as a metaphorical Capitolio, a means of examining the nature of power, its cause and effect, modern architecture juxtaposed with poverty: something is rotten in the Capitolio. Anderson was given audience with Venezuela’s Socialist leader Hugo Chavez on numerous occasions, but the photographer insists that this is not primarily a political work, or what we ordinarily think of as photojournalism. Politics does pervade these images, but rather than declare rights or wrongs, the artist immerses himself to convey something of the experience of being there — a documentary made by a poet.

 

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Pat Padua bridges high-brow and low-brow to form a distinctive American pan-browism. He hears the voices cry out from the Western Canon to Justin Timberlake, and, with an arsenal of optical tools ranging from disposable message cameras to the sharpest …

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