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Born in Canada in 1970 and raised in Texas, Anderson began his career working for local newspapers.
This photograph is from Anderson’s book Approximate Joy, a study of modern China as it continues to rapidly develop and evolve. Traveling through the country, Anderson was “struck by the way that so many places in China’s cities are lit” at night – an observation seen in this portrait of a street in Shenzhen, a former fishing village and now China’s fifth-largest city.
The series is not meant to be overly political, according to Anderson, or even a comment on China specifically – but instead an analysis of how, as the world continues to modernise, more and more of it ends up looking exactly the same.
“I didn’t set out to make a book about China,” he has said. “I think I made a book that comments on the idea of consumerist society and something that speaks to a more universal theme: the nature of happiness and consumerism. It just so happened that I photographed it in China.”
