Capitolio
The images that form Christopher Anderson’s book 'Capitolio' play out as a cinematic journey through the upheavals of contemporary Caracas
Christopher Anderson’s study of Caracas, Venezuela depicts a poetic and politicized vision of a city ripping apart with popular unrest. In the tradition of such earlier projects as William Klein’s New York (1954-55) and Robert Frank’s The Americans (1958), documentary photographer Christopher Anderson’s exploration of Caracas, Venezuela, brings to light the plight of a city and a country whose turmoil remains largely unreported by Western media.No stranger to such fraught situations (he covered the 2006 conflict between Hezbollah and Israel from its inception), Anderson notates the country’s 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. He continues, “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’.”
