George Edward Anderson differed from many of the world's great documentary photographers in that he served for four years as a bishop of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and spent a stretch as a missionary in England. But overall he shared the hallmark characteristics: toiling in obscurity, strained family life, unwavering vision and a poverty-inducing obsession for his subject and the act of photographing.

Photography came of age at the same time as Mormonism — and they moved west together. Anderson's mentor, Charles Roscoe Savage, settled in Utah a little ahead of the arrival of William Henry Jackson and the other Western survey photographers.