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.

Co-published with GUN, Stockholm

Exhibition: Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, 10 February to 15 September 2024

Estimated availability date: February 2024.
Pre-order (without advance payment) possible.