Anders Petersen - City Diary, Exhibition poster 2024 / Hasselblad Center, Sweden
$ 36.96
Description
Anders Petersen - City Diary, Exhibition poster 2024 / Hasselblad Center, Sweden. In 1997, a touring exhibition took a comprehensive look at Petersen's work between 1966 and 1996 (at the Hasselblad Center, among other institutions). He himself has described the exhibition as an opportunity to reflect on the past and as a catalyst for change. Anders Petersen - City Diary, Paris, 2006 Exhibition poster, Hasselblad Center, Sweden, 2024 70 x 50 cm. Very good condition. Ship worldwide with tracking and insured shipping. ** Anders Petersen, a Swedish photographer born in 1944, is one of the most influential photographers of his generation. After studying under Christer Strömholm at Stockholm’s renowned School of Photography between 1966 and 1968, he began working as a photojournalist for Swedish newspapers and magazines. Since that time, he has been particularly interested in people on the fringe of society. Petersen seeks his subjects out in nightclubs, prisons, psychiatric institutions and nursing homes, capturing the socially isolated and the personal circumstances in compelling black and white visual essays. Petersen found fame with his portraits of prostitutes, the homeless and other social rejects who took refuge and made their temporary home in Café Lehmitz, a dingy bar on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. These photos were taken at the end of the Sixties and reflect a sense of lives lived outside of social norms, molded by an open approach to sexuality, love and violence. Shortly after his photos were exhibited at the International Photography Festival in Arles in 1977, Schirmer/Mosel in Munich brought out the ‘Café Lehmitz’ book of prints which went on to acquire cult status. In 1997, a touring exhibition took a comprehensive look at Petersen's work between 1966 and 1996 (at the Hasselblad Center, among other institutions). He himself has described the exhibition as an opportunity to reflect on the past and as a catalyst for change. He viewed his older material with new eyes, resulting in the book Du mich auch (2002). It consists of previously unpublished images from Stockholm and Hamburg taken in the late 1960s. They form a visual diary and the concept of combining images from different years and places is something he has worked with in several books and exhibitions since then. In the 2000s, the expression in Anders Petersen's images becomes darker and more contrasting, inspired by contemporary Japanese photography. He spent residencies in cities around the world and it is in connection with this that the concept of the city diary begins to take shape. It became the collective name for the pictures he took both at home in Sweden and in London, Istanbul, Rome - to name a few of the cities he visited. Regardless of the location, however, the aesthetic expression is the same. His work can be seen as a personal diary, where the people, environments, and situations he depicts are also a reflection of his life and himself. City Diary is the title of his second exhibition at the Hasselblad Center, which runs through spring and summer 2024. It features nearly 150 photographs taken over the past 60 years. It combines images from different times and cities to create a flow and a sense of connection between people. The images show slices of life with all its contrasts - the raw and the hard, the vulnerable and the tender. They focus on longing, and people's basic needs and desires - love and community. Many of the photographs are close-up depictions of bodies, but there are also more classic portraits of individuals with strong personal charisma. We see many images of animals, underscoring the fascination with primitive and fundamental drives. But above all, we see Anders Petersen's deep interest in the people he photographs, which he believes is more important than the image itself: "It was rarely about photography. Not in the first place. It was meeting people, exploring different realities, that was crucial. That's still the case."
