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Capitolio.
Photographs by Christopher Anderson.
RM,
2009.
132 pp.,
10 color and 75 black & white illustrations,
13x11½".
Publisher's Description
Capitolio is NewYork documentary
photographer Christopher
Anderson’s cinematic journey
through the upheavals of contemporary
Caracas,Venezuela, in the
tradition of such earlier projects as
William Klein’s New York (1954–55)
and Robert Frank’s The Americans
(1958). It presents a poetic and
politicized vision, by one of today’s
finest documentary photographers,
of a city and a country that
is ripping apart at the seams
under the stress of popular unrest,
and whose turmoil remains largely
unreported byWestern media. No
stranger to such fraught situations
(he covered the 2006 conflict
between Hezbollah and Israel from
its inception), Anderson notates
the country’s current incongruities,
where the violent and the sensual
intermingle chaotically.“The word
‘capitolio’ refers to the domed
building that houses a government,”
writes Anderson, elaborating
on the title of this volume;
“here, the city of Caracas,
Venezuela, is itself a metaphorical
capitolio building. The decaying
Modernist architecture,with a jungle
growing through the cracks,
becomes the walls of this building
and the violent streets become the
corridors where the human drama
plays itself out in what President
Hugo Chavez called a ‘revolution.’”
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