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| Photo: Anders Petersen. |
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| Photo: Anders Petersen. |
The way I walk is just the way I walk / The way I talk is just the way I talk / The way I smile is just the way I smile
– Jack Scott, “The Way I Walk” (1959)
The lessons that you are meant to learn, the hardships to be triumphed over when you nurture the strength to stand alone and grow in the darkness. And then the other essence in this life – the fire of meaningful human connection with those who point out the absolute necessities for growth, the things that you have perhaps never seen or heard before, whether it is through art or this scarce thing called affection.
Two minutes into The Cramps’ sublimely phantasmagorical though very, very real performance at the Napa State Mental Hospital north of San Fracisco on June 13, 1978, singer Lux Interior addresses his unusual audience with the utmost form of tenderness: “Somebody told me you people were crazy, but I’m not sure about that. You seem to be alright to me.” And then the band kicks in with “The Way I Walk”, this ode to selfhood and the right to carry yourself with conviction and moral stance, no matter the peculiarities. The fact that a girl from The Cramps’ tour entourage was warned by the inmates not to dance too blissfully to this song, as “you might wind up being here”, is evidence enough that this world was just built for a certain type of people.
When I met Anders Petersen (b 1944) for a substantial text in L’Oeil de la Photographie in 2019, the Swedish maestro explained that a major incentive for his photography is to experience what’s behind all the closed doors: “The more you are out and meet people, you discover that we are one large family and that we are not so different. We are relatives, the whole bunch, and that is the very underpinning of everything. And if you hold that belief it is fantastic to see how many doors that are opened for you. And it is important that the doors are being opened because I am not so interested in superficial things. Other people’s concerns are also yours. You must remember this and not be too much dazzled by the exterior. In order to make good progress you have to enter. And when you come in, things will happen.”
In his book Documentary Photography, Arthur Rothstein delineates how a new photographic idiom was well under way in mid-century United States, pictures that were far from the cosy stuff of Family of Man (1955): “These pictures, seemingly haphazard and elementary, showed America in the most ordinary, commonplace, and even banal activities. Yet, they were intensely disturbing and personal. They were views in ordinary public settings of sadness and disenchantment that had never been presented before.”
There is a deep-seated discipline in Anders Petersen’s directly-lived and involving photography suggestive of Robert Frank’s great journey across the US in 1955–57 with a 35mm camera – which of course became the much-celebrated photobook The Americans – since both of these photographic worlds are highly spiritual, physical, emotional, psychological, and made with effort, courage and intention.
Their ways to interact with reality couldn’t be more of an opposite, however: whereas Frank’s attitude towards his work was fuelled by political acerbity (“I don’t have any respect for anybody in front of my camera. I use them. I manipulate them to suit my purposes. I don’t tell the truth”), Petersen’s images are the ones teeming with reciprocity and belonging (“I’d rather be someone’s fellow man than someone’s photographer”), and what he is looking for is fundamentally refinement. It is the refinement that comes from other people when they sharpen us by challenge.
In The Bad and the Beautiful (2020), Helmut Newton is heard saying that he uses the camera as a shield between himself and what he sees. For the past decades, Petersen’s camera of choice has been the pocket-sized Contax T3. But whatever camera he works with, it is first and foremost used as a key to human interaction. What transpires between the photographer and the people he is portraying is vulnerable friendship, verisimilitude, a sense of yearning and a sacred trust that make Petersen’s images special and distinct. Yet the greatest beauty in his portraits is that this is a family of people who leave something for themselves, the residual mystery that Walker Evans argued made the best photographs.
Never before shown pictures (lush darkroom prints adeptly done by Nikko Knösch) from the three clusters of work jointly known as Anders Petersen’s “Institutional Trilogy” are now on show at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm. These are images from Prison (1981–84), On the Line of Love (1989–91), Petersen’s work from an elderly care centre, and No One Has Seen It All (1993–95), his touching account from a mental institution – together with an overwhelming cinematic interpretation of Petersen’s work by Swedish-born filmmaker Johan Renck. It was Renck’s suggestion to name the exhibition The Left Shore – most likely after Ed van der Elsken’s bohemian photo-novel from Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Love on the Left Bank (1956) – and it was Petersen’s curatorial partner Angie Åström who brought them together.
“I became interested in a certain type of photography that touches me and that I never tire of but keep coming back to. That is how I feel about Anders’s pictures, you always find new stories in them,” explains Angie Åström. “This is also about Anders’s new way of looking at the pictures because it has been so long since the books came out. So this is like experiencing the series anew, in another form. This is an entirely different approach where you are able to regard the pictures more as standalone works.”
John Keats wrote to a friend in 1817 that “I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the heart’s affections and the truth of the imagination.” The trilogy that very much resonances with Keats’s sentiment is presented in three burgundy-painted cabinet rooms, one for each series, and the display goes from salon hang to a tight grid. “It is nice to see these pictures again. There are so many memories associated with the people, above all. I stayed in these places for a long time, two and a half or three years on each project,” says Petersen. “I remember the names of almost all of them, and they are people who stay with you throughout your life.”
Among the pictures in the first little room with the series from the senior centre in southern Stockholm (nicknamed the “Castle” in the book), Petersen picks out two of these souls who have remained with him, though it was several decades ago since they left this mortal world: “Elsa, she is ninety-four years old here. When I came in to see her, she offered me a glass of sherry, and she had a record player and put on a waltz and we started dancing. There were many older gents who liked her. And this is Bert, a wonderful man, a gentleman. He used to go to [the amusement park] Gröna Lund when he was a bit younger to dance, and he was a charmer.”
Anders Petersen mentions Bruce Davidson’s East 100th Street (1970), with continuous compassionate emotion, and Davidson’s wonderful faculty to balance his technical skills (these pictures were shot with a really large camera) on top of his temperament and curiosity, and the American photographer’s ability to listen. “It is about the identification process again, you see yourself – and of course you are scared. I am anxious most of the time, but it is okay to be scared. You just have to deal with it. One way is to be able to photograph it, it’s a foothold for yourself,” reveals Petersen. “What’s important is that the audience or viewer can identify with these people so that the situation doesn’t take over, that there is compassion – all the time – as an opening to be able to understand and feel and gain more knowledge, to be able to grasp it and deal with the situation. Surely, isn’t that so?”
In this cabinet with people who nowadays live on in the memory layers of silvered gelatine is a print of a woman with a vacuum cleaner hose over her shoulder, and a ghostlike manly figure with Brezhnev-thick eyebrows in the background. The old woman’s glower is so bleak that it makes Åström remark that “I think it’s a bit funny because here she is glaring at the photographer and is a bit moderately annoyed …”
“No, excuse me!” Petersen leaps in (and note how he is speaking of these people as if they were still alive). “She’s not annoyed at all – no, no, no – not in the slightest. I know her well, and she is a determined, loving person who has worked in healthcare for thirty years. I went up to her and asked her – and she had seen me walking around there for about six months – if I could take her portrait. ‘You can,’ she said. Then she just stood there and looked straight into the camera. This is a person who knows what she’s doing, and she loves it. She loves people. I liked her very much and I like the picture; it is a true depiction of her and her pride and self-assurance. But her gaze is not to be trifled with.”
When Richard Avedon presented his Nothing Personal in 1965, he employed the decade’s graphical lingo of dynamic sentiments in black-and-white, in this particular book with pictures of the unjustly rich sided by individuals locked away in mental asylums.
“I believe I was drawn to them for their fire. The honest, purposeful self-examination of a traumatised life creates a heat so exquisite that it burns away the usual appeasements, self-deceptions, and defences,” argues Martha Stout in The Myth of Sanity. “As a psychologist, and as a human being, I am impressed with the irony that these severely traumatised patients, people who have been through living nightmares [often] become the true keepers of the faith and are the most passionately alive people I know.”
Even in No One Has Seen It All, Petersen succeeds in his very own photosynthesis to convert darkness into rampant, effulgent life – even though he had to take a long break at a certain point as he realised that he was losing his clarity of vision, that his work had become reportage. In the country where the ultimate violation is to question the swallowers of slogans, and where every accomplishment above mediocrity is stymied and met by odium, it is a boon to encounter these mental patients who have turned their pain into armour. Here you will meet the woman with a medallion filled with pictures of herself and a personal autonomy so obvious that Nurse Ratched would have thrown in the towel.
There exists a picture taken by Gisela Kluge of a dark-haired Anders Petersen in a mod-like hairdo and a black leather jacket, having a conversation with an old lady at the Café Lehmitz in 1970. Behind him in the fabled Hamburg bar are two bottles of beer and his Nikon with the big F on the bow, the tool that he used to shoot one of the most famous photobooks of our time.
The Café Lehmitz project started in 1967 when Petersen was a student at Christer Strömholm’s Fotoskolan in Stockholm but spent much of his time in the louche parts of Hamburg, specifically in the St Pauli-Reeperbahn area where he soon became on equal footing with a tribe of friends who lived their lives in ways that most people would never understand. All that is left of this today (when even the bar is gone and replaced by Motel One Hamburg am Michel) is this masterpiece. Photographed long ago when Petersen was in his mid-twenties, Café Lehmitz appears to have become the kind of impediment to him as Fritz Lang’s success noir M (1931) was to Peter Lorre – something that he just has to live with for the rest of his life.
Some of the most interesting individuals that Petersen encountered in Hamburg in the late 1960s were men who had done terrible things and spent many years under lock and key. One of them suggested that Petersen should try to photograph the world inside a prison. Another incentive for the first series in Petersen’s “Institutional Trilogy” was Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s television series Berlin Alexanderplatz (1980) which commences with the character Franz Biberkopf, fresh out of prison, and all the adversities that he has to face just to endure this new life in “freedom”.
The American photographer Paul Strand said that “Photography is only a new road from a different direction, but moving toward the common goal that is life.” In the beginning of the 1980s, Petersen was authorised by the famous prison warden Annbritt Grünewald to spend his days (which became years) inside the seven-metre-high walls of the Österåker Prison north of Stockholm. The Prison series is the hardest one to scrutinise in the exhibition since it looks so breathable and almost innocent in comparison to the evil mayhem that Sweden is today, less than half a century later.
“I found Anders in Paris because he had an exhibition there at his gallery, Galerie VU’. I also found his books at the Centre Pompidou,” tells Angie Åström. “When I moved back to Stockholm, I felt that I wanted to do something else so I contacted Anders and asked if we could meet. At that time, this was in 2013, he was working on an exhibition at the Bibliothèque nationale de France. And then we met. We started hanging out, and I often got quite annoyed about things like the fact that so few Swedish photographers are shown in Sweden, that people are not proud of them, and that they haven’t taken care of Anders. Then I started thinking about how we could do an exhibition, linked to Swedish conditions.”
That first exhibition was Stockholm at Liljevalchs City Art Gallery in 2019, which grew and grew for years to become the largest photo show ever produced in Sweden, and it sure worked magic. When Åström contacted Johan Renck about a possible synergy at Nationalmuseum, he responded not only once but twice. ”The question came to me, and it was obvious. I would do anything to be close to Anders Petersen,” says Renck who was the one who directed David Bowie’s last music videos – “Blackstar” (2015) and “Lazarus” (2016) with Bowie in an old hospital bed, literally facing death as he was taking his last dance steps in a 1974 costume. (Bowie died on January 10, 2016, only two days after his sixty-ninth birthday.)
There are two beautiful publications from Gösta Flemming’s Journal Photobooks related to The Left Shore exhibition: Early Portraits with pictures from Stockholm and Hamburg, 1967–70. There is a marvellous maturity in these works that waver between the advantages and disadvantages of being under Christer Strömholm’s guidance. While this young photographer took a lot of pictures that were deeply influenced by Strömholm’s profoundly symbolical imagery, surely with an undertone to please his father figure, most of the pictures in this book is Anders Petersen finding his way as he is unlocking the world with a camera.
Early Portraits comes with a C stamped on the thick red back cover. The C tagging routine was Christer Strömholm’s idea of student endorsement: “He marked a C on the few photos he could come to terms with,” Petersen disclosures in the book. “I copied several of the negatives marked with C, small strange and hard images that were really just imitations of Christer’s own. They were vulnerable, and I liked them. But they felt as if they didn’t belong to me.” It is quite revealing that only a few of these Christer-approved images have been chosen for this elegant volume.
The second book is called The Left Shore: Johan Renck Meets Anders Petersen, and Flemming says that “This is not an exhibition catalogue, but rather a spinoff in which Johan has selected images from Anders’s entire body of work, which Anders and I have then compiled in this publication so that you can bring home something from this exhibition, if you wish, since it summarises what is on display here.” This selection of pictures is arguably darker as Renck has emphasised unsmiling faces, agony, raw sex and people in beds.
“There is a stillness and a purity in Anders’s pictures. I am probably a little darker than Anders, I think. I am drawn to a slightly more dramatic darkness,” confesses Johan Renck with a smile. “I’m a big admirer of Anders’s pictures and I don’t know why. It’s my taste and the kind of material that I am drawn to. I’m close to photography itself, so I probably see it with such eyes.”
“It was a pretty general idea that we would do something together,” he continues. “I have always been a great admirer of still images, and the fascination with the frozen moment versus the moving image is interesting. I have previously worked with still images and tried to translate it into cinematic material, but never in this way. It was about taking Anders’s work and make it move, perhaps devising a before and after of the frozen moment that the image represents. The only thing that is real is the image that Anders has taken; now the images are shifting and it is completely fictionalised.”
What Petersen and Renck do have in common is their capacity to see beyond the curtains of collective agreement – the fragile, the dreary, the broken, the against-all-the-odds beautiful – but there is nevertheless something in Renck’s work that leaves you flustered since his sincere sagacity is so often hampered by a weakness for surface darkness. “What’s so fun about this is that the images come to life. I am unsure after I’ve seen the film – is this how the images are supposed to look? But I think it is exciting that the images take on a new identity,” says Angie Åström about what is going on in the first room of the exhibition.
There is a mediocre film called The Childhood of a Leader (2015) and the grandiloquent score by Scott Walker just kills the little that is good in it. The screen at the Nationalmuseum exhibition is big and wide and Krister Linder’s score is loud and overpowering (though not bad at all in itself), and you get so confused by the gloomy editing of the rubberised pictures that are floating by that it almost takes the whole run of the film to figure out that everything that you have witnessed is a show of almost one hundred pictures from Anders Petersen’s career of lived photography.
When I met Petersen in his Old Town lab in the summer of 2019, he told me that the clue to his magic “is about taking the time, both as a human being and a photographer, and not looking for the spectacular and dramatic situations. Because if you do, you will end up in a photography that easily depicts the superficial. I am looking to find a photography that unites people instead of isolating them. I want to obtain a photography that people can identify with and recognise themselves in. And when it comes to people, there is no better way than to just sit down and talk with them, it is that simple. You must absolutely have a curiosity that is true and correct, otherwise it doesn’t work.”
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| Photo: Anders Petersen. |
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| Photo: Anders Petersen. |
Anders Petersen and Johan Renck: The Left Shore at Nationalmuseum in Stockholm through January 11, 2026.