Matt Anderson Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1948 -

At the age of eighteen, when Matthew Anderson IV came to New Orleans as a Tulane University undergraduate, he had already been taking pictures for eight years. A native of Miami, Florida, born to Matthew Anderson III and Julia Siry, Anderson found a home in New Orleans and has photographed the city extensively in his decades-long residency, while also using it as a base of operations to photograph elsewhere. He cites numerous influences from many fields on his work as a photographer: photographers Henri Cartier-Bresson, Ralston Crawford, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans; editors John Loengard, Edward Steichen, and Roy E. Stryker; painters John Singer Sargent, James McNeil Whistler, and Newell Convers Wyeth; poets Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Donald Hall, and Philip Levine; writers John Berger, John Collier, Gordon Parks, and Eudora Welty; and filmmakers Robert Flaherty and Ingmar Bergman.

Over the course of nearly three decades (1975–2002), extended travel to Guatemala, the United Kingdom and Ireland, continental Europe, and the former Soviet Union have permitted Anderson an especially rich mix of photographic opportunities. Though his freelance practice began in college and included a wide variety of subjects, his most concentrated work is in the photographs he made in New Orleans of musicians, cultural events, and the performing arts—from jazz funerals to high society gatherings, and from ballet to symphonic music. Anderson’s archive was mostly destroyed by Hurricane Katrina in 2005 or dispersed in the confusion that followed.