Böcker av Anders Petersen

This book is the latest of Anders Petersen's award-winning City Diaries, the first three of which are now out of print. Throughout his career Petersen has traveled extensively and documented life beyond the margins of polite society, a shadowy world of pleasure and sin including prostitutes, transvestites, alcoholics, nighttime lovers and adult conflict. Through his candid, empathetic yet somewhat detached eye, he discloses difficult realities such as drug addiction with a sense of bewilderment and currency. City Diary #4 shows Petersen's ongoing photographic engagement with the gritty and beautiful in life as it unfolds before him.

Since the 1960s Anders Petersen has traveled extensively and photographed life beyond the margins of polite society for his acclaimed City Diaries. Petersen's is an indiscriminate and intensely empathetic eye, one shaped by a fundamental connection with those he photographs-"To me, it's all about people ... what they do, what they believe, their dreams, hopes, visions and virtues." His subjects, a world including prostitutes, transvestites, alcoholics and nighttime lovers-intimacy and conflict, joy and melancholy, clarity and ambiguity in equal measure-reveal his passion to identify and engage with subcultures and "life in the shadows," not merely to document them. To discover the gritty in the beautiful and the beautiful in the gritty, in impressionist images of deep blacks and stark contrasts which compellingly avoid cliché. Presenting photos made between 1967 and 2019, City Diary #1-7 contains all books in the series to date: re-prints of the first three-which received the Paris Photo-Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award in 2012-alongside four new volumes.

The book presents a selection of the photographic work made in Naples by Anders Petersen, Swedish master of photography, during Spot home gallery's first artist residency in the year 2022. Throughout his long career, Petersen has photographed in cities across almost every continent, from Tokyo to London, from Valparaiso to Stockholm, driven by an inexhaustible curiosity and a profound interest for the other. For him, photography serves as a means to explore the complexity of the human experience, to capture with sensitivity and honesty the emotions that define and unite us as living beings, part of the one, big, same family. Naples, a "city-world" of many thousand facets, with its chaos and its diverse humanity, was the ideal place for a photographer like him: it is precisely in chaos that life unfolds with all its unpredictability, vibrancy, and beauty. They had never met before, but when it happened, it was love at first sight. Anders was struck by the city's energy and enthusiastically accepted the not-so-easy challenge of photographing it. Naples revealed herself without filters, without fear of showing its wounds and vulnerabilities, open to the empathetic approach of a photographer who can look beyond the surface of things, who can find beauty in the ordinary, and embrace its imperfections.

Zoo is a wild ride through Anders Petersen's oeuvre, a racy edit of his work that has animals as its central theme. Whether they be conscious portraits of animals or a haphazard photographic encounter with a woman's legs in python-print tights, Petersen draws out the animal and animalistic in all that he sees. At a typical zoo we are the spectators, peering in on creatures as they go about their existence, mostly oblivious to our presence. Yet in Zoo we find ourselves both behind and before the bars of the cage-with Petersen as the delighted zookeeper.