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.

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 subsequently toured Europe. Petersen’s “City Diary” series has been shown at the Stockholm City Museum in 2021 and at the Hasselblad Center, Gothenburg, in 2024.