RI Anderson
Written by Lon Levin
such as Diane Arbus, Sally Mann and Cindy Sherman, and by painters including Hieronymus Bosch, Frida Kahlo and Leonora Carrington.
Tell us how your backgrounds played a part in your choice to be an artist/photographer? I think that I always used photography as a way of orienting myself to what was going on both around me and inside me. Being behind a camera gave me an excuse to hide myself, and also a way of focusing in and seeing things in new ways. I love spending long hours in the dark room with the magenta toned safe light, where I was mesmerized by images floating to the surface of the chemical filled trays.
How did you get started in business and what did you do? When friends knew I was a photographer, they would ask me to make portraits of them, and to photograph events and weddings. I started doing this to make money, but found that my idea of an interesting portrait didn’t usually correlate with their idea of a flattering picture. As I began exhibiting my photographs in galleries I began working as a photographer reproducing art. A lot of my friends were artists, and I lived in art studios all over Boston, so much of my paying work was making slides of artists’ work. I also worked as a
When did you first think about what you wanted to do as an adult? Were you encouraged or discouraged by family, friends, teachers, mentors? As a kid I loved drawing and painting. I was encouraged by my parents, relatives and friends. My mother and her friends were creative and whenever we visited them I was guided through art projects from collage to puppet making, painting and sculpting. What kind of kid were you? Where did you grow up? What or who were your influences? I was an extremely shy kid who loved spending time drawing, spying on other people, and doing cartwheels in the back yard. Until the age of 12, I moved every year or two, from Boston to Pennsylvania to Massachusetts, Minnesota and Connecticut. After that my parents settled outside Hartford, CT and then moved to New York City. I was influenced by books like Harriet the Spy, Betty & Veronica comics, rock and roll, especially the Rolling Stones and The Beatles,and jazz dance. When I started photographing as an adult, I was influenced by photographers 34
