‘He sent someone to intimidate me’: Christopher Anderson, the photographer who shot Jeffrey Epstein | Photography

It didn’t come as an ideal shock to Christopher Anderson to search out out that his title was within the Epstein information. In 2015, he was assigned by New York journal to {photograph} the American financier for a deliberate profile interview by the American journalist Michael Wolff.

“I didn’t know who Jeffrey Epstein was at all,” says Anderson. He admits that he usually didn’t analysis the individuals he was photographing, and went into the job unaware that Epstein was a toddler intercourse offender who had been convicted in 2008 for soliciting prostitution from a minor, and had served 13 months in a Palm Beach County jail in Florida. “What I knew was that this guy is a rich and powerful man connected to rich and powerful men.”

Epstein demanded an advance assembly, “to suss me out”, Anderson believes, and to barter shopping for the rights to the images for $20,000 (£15,000). Anderson remembers “quite an unnerving person. He played with the theatrics of intimidation. He wanted to impress upon me that he was somebody powerful that I wouldn’t want to cross.”

The shoot happened at Epstein’s residence in New York City, the place one room contained a stuffed tiger. “Epstein was a creepy guy with a particular Donald Trump-esque home-decorating taste,” Anderson says. Other issues he witnessed have taken on a extra sinister that means with time, together with “a young woman with an eastern European accent who answered the door. At one point, she was taking down a massage table that had been in one of the rooms.”

The journal article fell by. According to Anderson, Epstein then began to demand the photographs, and it’s the e-mail exchanges between Anderson and Lesley Groff, Epstein’s long-time private secretary, that characteristic among the many 3.5m pages launched by the US Department of Justice. Their back-and-forth culminated in Epstein sending a person referred to as Merwin – “very large with very large, black leather-gloved hands”, Anderson remembers – over to the photographer’s studio. “It was very mafia-esque. He sent him to intimidate me and make sure he got the hard drive.”

Recently, Anderson rediscovered copies he’d saved on one other exhausting drive. One picture, taken inside Epstein’s mansion, exhibits a printed e-mail on a desk that seems to point out a declare of $60,000 (£45,000) in unpaid employees wages referring to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson. It appears, from the Epstein information, that the previous prince and his then spouse have been searching for Epstein’s help, probably requesting he pay the invoice on their behalf. “I made a few photographs in his house,” Anderson says. “I wish I’d made a lot more now.”

The Epstein photographs seem in Anderson’s new e-book, Index, a wide-ranging physique of labor stretching again over the past 30 years, together with hard-hitting photographs from Haiti and Afghanistan, road images from China, vehicles, household holidays, Donald Trump and a current portfolio of the president’s inside circle.

Born in 1970 in Kelowna, British Columbia, Canada, Anderson grew up in Abilene, Texas. In 1999, he and journalist Michael Finkel joined 44 Haitian refugees on a small, home made wood boat as they tried to succeed in the US. The ship began sinking in open water. Fortunately, the US Coast Guard arrived simply in time. Anderson’s photographs from the boat earned him the 2000 Robert Capa Gold Medal and led to work in battle zones, together with post-9/11 Afghanistan, Gaza, Lebanon and Iraq. “I’m a photographer. I want to photograph the most compelling things in my moment on this planet,” he says.

Now based mostly in Paris, Anderson primarily works on movie star portraits (George Clooney, Jeremy Allen White, Rosalía) for magazines, alongside private initiatives, together with film-making. When Vanity Fair requested him to {photograph} Trump’s White House workforce, he assumed it needed him to provide them the “celebrity” remedy, which is why he initially declined, solely accepting the gig once they advised him they needed him to “dust off” his “journalist hat”. Still, many photographers would have refused the task. “I felt it was my role as a photographer to go and, as accurately and honestly as I could, depict what it was I experienced and saw,” he says. “That is the job.”

Does that journalistic duty prolong so far as recognized paedophiles? Many photographers would need nothing to do with somebody like Epstein. Knowing what we all know now, together with Epstein’s a long time of trafficking of underage women for intercourse, would Anderson nonetheless take an task to {photograph} him if he was alive right now? “Yes, I would take that assignment because I feel my responsibility is to go and make a photograph that reveals something about that person,” he says. “If there’s one thing that I’m equipped to do, it’s that.”

Historical data … 5 photographs from Index

Jeffrey Epstein at his residence in New York City, United States, 2015 (most important picture)“This portrait shows a man looking at me in a way to let me know that he is intimidating me. It’s not a celebrity photograph. I like to think I made a portrait of him that reveals something about him.”

Staten Island Ferry, New York, United States, 2011
“This was taken on the Staten Island Ferry that goes between Lower Manhattan and Staten Island. You pass by the Statue of Liberty. There is something in this picture that takes me to the idea of immigration, what it means to be an American, and the contradictory feelings of that in this day and age.”

Trump’s inside circle on the White House
“Group shots are a photographer’s nightmare,” says Anderson. “This has the added factors of who these people are and the short amount of time you’re going to get. There was an enormous amount of pressure.”

Market burning throughout a riot in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, 1999
“I worked in Haiti quite a bit. This was a time of political upheaval. There was some sort of riot and violence in the market that day, and part of the market caught on fire. This picture represents what Haiti is to me – a beautiful place that exists in heart-breaking chaos.”

Nuns on a flight from Milan to Paris, 2003
“This picture was important for me because it was a counterbalance to what my day job was, which was photographing difficult things in war. It’s a wonderful little gift from the photo gods and who doesn’t like flying nuns!”

Index by Christopher Anderson is printed by Stanley/Barker.