Anders Petersen: City Diary #4

This book is the latest of Anders PetersenÆs 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 PetersenÆs ongoing photographic engagement with the gritty and beautiful in life as it unfolds before him.

Born in 1944, Anders Petersen studied photography at Fotoskolan and later at the Institute for Cinema, Radio, Television and Theatre, both in Stockholm. In 1970 he founded the group of photographers Saftra together with Kenneth Gustavsson. Petersen is perhaps best known for his photos of the colorful, often unconventional, patrons of Café Lehmitz in Hamburg’s St. Pauli, resulting in his seminal book Café Lehmitz (1978). He has published and exhibited his photography extensively and in 2014 was the subject of a retrospective at the Bibliothéque National de France in Paris, which is now touring in Europe.