ANDERS PETERSEN
November 23, 2004 through February 12, 2005






March 2005

Review by James Crump

Stockholm-based photographer Anders Petersen has for over 30 years been working a seam in the portrait idiom that is impressive for its unrelenting show of the'inside'. Being an insider and recording one's life in a diaristic fashion is an ambiguous field to which all clever photographers seek entree to achieve documentary legitimacy. Petersen's output since the late 1960s places him at the forefront of this know common photographic style, along with its pioneers Larry Clark snd Ed van der Elsken.

In the late 1960s, Petersen embarked on an intensive reportage series that is today considered a classic, though often overlooked by younger practitioners. Having visited Hamburg at 16, Petersen returned in 1967 to begin his series 'Cafe Lehmitz', inspired by a seedy bar and its drunken customers. These photographs inderscore an approach to portraiture that is noteworthy for its gritty, up-close rendering of decadense and debauchery, the thriving underbelly of society that has appealed to photographers since Brassai's 'Paris de Nuit' (1933). There lurks in some of Petersen's pictures the possibility of violence, but his subjects mostly appear remarkably at ease with the photographer. It is difficult to imagine so many compelling images had he not been accepted into this edgy millieu.

His series executed in the confines of a psychiatric clinic,'‘Nobody has Seen Everything' (1995), suggests an extreme assimilation into a world of otherness. However, these portrats of the mentally disturbed are more carefully composed then those from 'Cafe Lehmitz', and point towards a tension between documentary and art photography. For example, two female patients wearing garlands of dried flowers, are seen locked in an embrace. Carefully posed, the photograph calls to mind the tableaux of Joel Peter Witkin and signals a type of collaboration and contrivance that distinguishes this series from Petersen’s earlier work.

The most fully evolved series of pictures in this exhibition reveals Petersen's evolution towards increasingly personal and darkly poetic subject matter. Stapled to the gallery walls and arranged in a quasi-salon-style montage, 'Close Distance' (1998-2001) brings together black-and-white portraits of friends, couples, lovers, children, and animals as well as explicit sexual images. A frisson of personal angst and ennui infuses many of these marvellous photographs, accentuated by the grainy textures of the prints and the uncanny juxtapositions: the body of a horse here, an image of a snowman there, painfully close-up images of faces and heads, a woman performing fellatio, a man with his face burried in his female partner’s arse. Eroticism, fecundity and interior, emotional states are interspersed with personal nostalgia and a sense of loss. Consistently beautiful and deeply arresting, 'Close Distance' is the apogee and logical end result of this important artist’s career.