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It didn’t come as a great shock to Christopher Anderson to find out that his name was in the Epstein files. In 2015, he was assigned by New York magazine to photograph the American financier for a planned profile interview by the American journalist Michael Wolff.

“I didn’t know who Jeffrey Epstein was at all,” says Anderson. He admits that he often didn’t research the people he was photographing, and went into the job unaware that Epstein was a child sex 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 meeting, “to suss me out”, Anderson believes, and to negotiate buying the rights to the pictures 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 took place at Epstein’s home in New York City, where one room contained a stuffed tiger. “Epstein was a creepy guy with a particular Donald Trump-esque home-decorating taste,” Anderson says. Other things he witnessed have taken on a more sinister meaning with time, including “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 magazine article fell through. According to Anderson, Epstein then started to demand the photos, and it’s the email exchanges between Anderson and Lesley Groff, Epstein’s long-time personal secretary, that feature among the 3.5m pages released by the US Department of Justice. Their back-and-forth culminated in Epstein sending a man called 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 another hard drive. One image, taken inside Epstein’s mansion, shows a printed email on a desk that appears to show a claim of $60,000 (£45,000) in unpaid staff wages relating to Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Sarah Ferguson. It seems, from the Epstein files, that the former prince and his then wife were seeking Epstein’s assistance, possibly requesting he pay the bill on their behalf. “I made a few photographs in his house,” Anderson says. “I wish I’d made a lot more now.”

The Epstein photos appear in Anderson’s new book, Index, a wide-ranging body of work stretching back over the last 30 years, including hard-hitting images from Haiti and Afghanistan, street photography from China, cars, family holidays, Donald Trump and a recent portfolio of the president’s inner 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, homemade wooden boat as they attempted to reach the US. The ship started sinking in open water. Fortunately, the US Coast Guard arrived just in time. Anderson’s photos from the boat earned him the 2000 Robert Capa Gold Medal and led to work in conflict zones, including 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 in Paris, Anderson mainly works on celebrity portraits (George Clooney, Jeremy Allen White, Rosalía) for magazines, alongside personal projects, including film-making. When Vanity Fair asked him to photograph Trump’s White House team, he assumed it wanted him to give them the “celebrity” treatment, which is why he initially declined, only accepting the gig when they told him they wanted him to “dust off” his “journalist hat”. Still, many photographers would have refused the assignment. “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 responsibility extend as far as known paedophiles? Many photographers would want nothing to do with someone like Epstein. Knowing what we know now, including Epstein’s decades of trafficking of underage girls for sex, would Anderson still take an assignment to photograph him if he was alive today? “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 records … five images from Index

Jeffrey Epstein at his home in New York City, United States, 2015 (main image)“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 inner circle at 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 during 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 published by Stanley/Barker.