Biography
Anders Petersen (b. 1944) is a Swedish photographer who lives and works in Stockholm. He began taking photographs in the 1960s, and his visual approach was strongly shaped by his studies with photographer Christer Strömholm, whose photography school in Stockholm Petersen attended from 1966 to 1968. He later continued his studies at Dramatiska Institutet from 1973 to 1974.
In Petersen’s photography, people are almost never simply observed from a distance. What matters to him is closeness — a relationship that develops through spending long periods of time among the people he photographs and gradually becoming part of their environment. One of the best-known examples of this approach is “Café Lehmitz”, photographed in Hamburg between 1967 and 1970. Here, Petersen documented not so much the bar itself as the human world that had formed within it — intimacy, loneliness, physicality, and the intensity of everyday life. In 1978, the series was published as a photobook.
Petersen later applied a similar approach while working in closed institutions — a prison, a nursing home, and a psychiatric hospital. In these projects, photography becomes not a brief visit, but a sustained presence alongside others. As a result, the people Petersen photographs rarely appear as anonymous “objects”; rather, they emerge as individuals with whom the photographer shares the same space and a certain sense of shared time.
In his later work, this relationship with his surroundings developed into a diary-like form of photography. The city, the people he encounters, bodies, animals, incidental details, and fragments of personal life come together in an ever-expanding visual narrative. For Petersen, photography becomes less a way of documenting the world than a way of being in it, using images to register his relationship with what and whom he encounters.
From 2003 to 2004, Petersen worked as Professor of Photography at the School of Photography and Film at the University of Gothenburg. In 2003, he was named Photographer of the Year at Les Rencontres d’Arles, and in 2006 he was shortlisted for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2007. In 2008, his work was honoured with the Dr. Erich Salomon Award, presented by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie. In 2009, together with JH Engström, he received the Contemporary Book Award in Arles for “From Back Home”, while in 2012 “City Diary” received the Paris Photo–Aperture Foundation PhotoBook of the Year Award. In 2013, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris presented a major retrospective of Petersen’s work. In 2019, he received the City of Stockholm’s Lennart af Petersens Prize, and in 2024 the Hasselblad Center in Gothenburg presented the exhibition “City Diary”, bringing together photographs made over nearly six decades.