Capitolio�a district in central Caracas. Caracas�the capital and, with over three million residents, the largest city of Rep�blica Bolivariana de Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela, the country�s official name since 1999). Neither the capital, a mountain range away from the Caribbean and a hop, skip, and Cuban jump from the Florida Keys, nor the country, call forth many images in this reviewer�s mind. Web-searching reminds me that it is tropical, just north of the equator, and home to Salto �ngel (Angel Falls), the world�s highest waterfall.



Christopher Anderson's Capitolio bears little resemblance to the scenic niceties one can find online, and indeed is not a place readily encapsulated by Google and Wikipedia. The facts above may help situate you; Anderson's photographs will destabilize you, as they resist overt description and consistently favor implication over explication. The graphic layout of the book reinforces the resistance to simple closure, with full-page bleeds, heavily inked and shadowy duotones, and images butted up against each other to link one perspective to others entirely separate in real space.



These photographs describe intangibles�fear, alienation, entropy, loss�better than place. Anderson is one of the contemporary Magnum photographers (like Jim Goldberg, Peter van Agtmael, and Antoine D'Agata) who are finding that truth lies in the universal messages discovered in the midst of specific, thoughtfully (even if rapidly) transcribed flashes of life. These very specific faces, deaths, costumes, and lusts were encountered in a neighborhood in Caracas, but in this collective form (and the collection is critical�the sum of such pictures is greater than the individual parts), the cries and lamentations reach beyond the Venezuelan mountaintops. This is an urban legend in the making, a dystopian city of darkness and bad intentions, only occasionally leavened by modesty and perilous grace. —George Slade