Biography Jonathan Anderson and Edwin Low have been collaborating as the team “Anderson & Low” since 1990. After the Royal Academy of Arts exhibited one of their early collaborations they decided to embark upon a long-term partnership which continues to this day. Their fine art work includes portraiture, nudes, architectural studies, reportage, landscape and highly disciplined studio-based images. Works by Anderson & Low, all noted for meticulous attention to form, lighting and printing, have been exhibited world-wide and are in a number of permanent collections, including the National Portrait Gallery of both the UK and Australia, and the United States Olympic Committee,
Their major exhibition The Athlete was staged at the invitation of the National Art Gallery of Malaysia for the 1998 Commonwealth Games Cultural Festival, before embarking on a four-year international tour, with venues including the US Olympic Centre and the National Portrait Gallery of Australia for the 2000 Olympic Games. Following the success of that exhibition Anderson & Low were asked by the US Olympic Committee to photograph a new project, American Athletes, which was exhibited at the US Olympic Centre in 2001 and toured through the USA.
An exhibition, The Contenders, of Anderson & Low’s images of British Athletes, was shown at the National Portrait Gallery, London, in celebration of the Manchester 2002 Commonwealth Games. Another exhibition simultaneously toured the Northwest of England using a selection of Anderson & Low’s images as the central photographic element.
In tandem with these images of athletes, Anderson & Low have photographed a separate project with the National Danish Gymnastic Team. These images consist of nude figurative studies based around classical imagery and iconography, translating the sporting ideal into a stylised abstracted form, and were published as the Gymnasts book. A further book, Athletes, collects images derived from Anderson & Low’s portraits of sporting people from around the world.
The duo have recently completed a project that has evolved from their work with athletes. Athlete/Warrior, started in Spring 2001, explores two contrasting modern interpretations of heroism portrayed as a series of diptychs and triptychs features images of athletes who are also cadets in US military academies. It received its premiere exhibition in the US Olympic Centre in Colorado Springs in June 2003 and the work has been collected in a recently-published book of the same name.
Anderson & Low’s interest in form is also clear from parallel projects, winning awards for their uniquely subjective and sensuous architectural imagery, that inspire a sense of wonder similar to that evoked by the buildings themselves. With time this work has become more abstract as the artists use architecture as a means of exploring the relationships between intangible concepts and concrete reality, describing the photographs as being “more like architectural imaginings, aspirations, ephemera.” By focusing upon line, form and detail Anderson & Low remove buildings from everyday functional existence, creating work of abstract beauty |
