Anders Petersen - Anders Petersen "Ich Dich lieben, Du mich auch?" - 2002

Anders Petersen
“Ich Dich lieben, Du mich auch?”

Café Lehmitz, a tavern in Hamburg: this is where Anders Petersen, a young Swedish photographer from a good family who learned photography – and probably also something about being human – with the famous Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, found himself at the end of the 1960s. For two, maybe three years, Petersen frequented the rough beer hall in which all formality and convention is thrown to the winds and where life is lived in the raw. Direct, blunt, full of gallows humour and despair.

Café Lehmitz is a direct, merciless book about life outside, outside the bourgeoisie. More books followed, books about growing old, about imprisonment, about people in psychiatric clinics. The very subject matter says it all: Anders Petersen seeks the fringes of life, the haunts of outcasts, where life is arduous, direct and harsh. Recently, his work has increasingly taken the form of a diary. These photographs show more clearly than ever how close he gets to people. He stands by his friends, empathizing and participating, revealing the forces that slumber within us all: aggression, sexuality, eroticism, longing and warmth. Petersen's photography is full of impassioned humanism.