Ajax loader

2009 EDITION

July 7th - September 13th

Anders Petersen

Anders Petersen

I like to look.

I want to have the innocent eyes of a child and look at the world for the first time.

I noticed I have a growing desire to be dog-like and primitive.

Someone photographing his experiences and memories on the fringes of identity, before they become more complex.

Understand that you find more creative vitamins in dirt on earth than mingling with angels in the sky.

Usually I don’t take pictures looking for reality.

Reality is overrated and means so many lovely and contradictory things.

But obviously, I like this confusion.

It’s a kind of platform allowing you to feel good inside, and I found out it helps a little to be shy and small.

Photography is never about photography, but sometimes it lightly touches your reality.

I believe in what I feel and if you illuminate it through yourself it can sometimes be a way to capture life as close as a self-portrait.

Never without risk, absolutely stimulating.

For me there are encounters that matter, pictures matter less.

You simply have to find your own act of balance, not being sentimental and not disappearing from these encounters and love affairs.

You need one foot inside the situation, but the other one outside.

So I keep trying to ask the same questions without ceremony

knowing there is more hidden than visible.

Always surprised by the unpredictable.


Anders Petersen


www.anderspetersen.se

Anders Pertersen is represented by VU’ la galerie.

Exhibition printed by Indigo Labbet, Stockholm.

Framing by Jean-Pierre Gapihan.

Anders Petersen

Born in 1944 in Stockholm, Sweden.

Lives and works in Sweden.


In 1966, Anders Petersen met Christer Strömholm and became a student at his School of Photography in Stockholm. Strömholm was not just his teacher but also a close friend. Their friendship influenced him for life. In 1967 he began photographing a bar called Cafe Lehmitz in Hamburg, where he had his first solo exhibition in 1970 with 350 photographs nailed to the wall; a book about it was published in 1978 in Germany. In 1973 he published his first book Gröna Lund. In 1974 he graduated from the Swedish film school Dramatiska Institutet in Stockholm. In 1984 the first book was published, a trilogy about locked institutions: a prison, a home for old people and a mental hospital. After photographing the mental hospital for three years he moved towards a more free, diary-like approach to photography. In 2003 and 2004 he was appointed professor of Photography in the School of Photography and Film, Göteborg, Sweden. He regularly has workshops and exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia and the USA. He has received numerous grants and rewards since the 1970s. In 2003 he was elected Photographer of the Year by the International Photofestival, Arles. In 2006 he was short-listed as one of four for the Deutsche Börse Photography Prize 2007. In 2007 he received the Special Prize of the Jury for his exhibition Exaltation of Humanity at the third International Photofestival, Lianzhou, China. In 2008, he received the Dr Erich Salomon Award by the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie, Germany.