These are days of intense heat in this unusual summer in this beautiful archipelago city known as Stockholm. Andersen meets me in his laboratory located on the island of the Old Town. In a narrow alley, with 1600s stone paving, the basement premises feel cool. Anders Petersen continues to work, essentially, in a traditional, analog way, developing film and printing on bromide paper. I find him looking at his latest works on his computer, one of the few signs that tells us that Petersen also uses, to a lesser extent, digital methodology.
He greets me with a warm welcome and a “wasn’t it yesterday!!!”, a typical Swedish expression of cordiality. It had been years since I visited him. I find him almost the same, only his hair has whitened and little betrays that this man has recently turned 70 years old. His vitality and productivity have not diminished, it is as intense as ever. His photographic activity began in the spring of 1966. As a photographer and teacher, he conducts activities in different European cities, one week in Rome, another in Moscow, another in Paris and another in Stockholm. His exhibitions, presentation of his books and his workshops take him constantly from one place to another. While he gives instructions to his young assistant on which chemicals to use to make contact prints of his latest shots, we sit in a small room. The room is surrounded by a bookshelf where thousands of negatives are arranged by year. His books and publications are also there. We have an open, fluid conversation without unnecessary preambles. Petersen is passionate about photography.
“What makes you travel to Valparaíso, a city so far away, on the other side of the ocean?”
“Sergio Larraín arouses my curiosity and I’m invited there to give a workshop. I was convinced by last year’s festival catalog, where Antoine d’Agata participated, with a cover with the name Paraíso, similar to the first edition of Valparaíso by Sergio Larraín. Wonderful work by Larraín. I don’t know anything about the city but I think of all its geometry, stairs, elevators and hills.”
It’s the first time Anders Petersen travels to Latin America. His work is almost unknown on the continent, although in 1994 he was presented at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago, in a collective along with 9 other Swedish photographers, called “Three generations of Swedish photography”, of which I myself was curator.
-Do you know the work of Latin American photographic authors?
-Very little. Besides Larraín, I know Martín Chambi, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Graciela Iturbide, Miguel Rio Branco and his fascinating work from the 90s. Salgado’s work in its beginnings, his book “Other Americas” is a masterpiece. However, his latest exhibition, Genesis, seems heavy to me, almost boring. When Salgado photographs workers, they resemble the propagandistic images of the Stalinist period. Heroic figures that don’t show their weaknesses and I think that, precisely through their weaknesses, people show their strengths.
-Besides Christer Strömholm, what other photographers have influenced your work?
-Without a doubt, Ed van der Elsken. (Dutch photographer, self-taught, like Strömholm) A master!!! His first book “Love on the Left Bank” is a true school. He made it when he was a printer at Magnum. He presents us with portraits under all kinds of light, in the twilight, in the afternoon, under the rain, under the sunlight, he presents us kisses, photography where form is dominant, he presents us all kinds of photography. I have also been influenced by the three ladies, as I call them: Diane Arbus, Nan Goldin and Lisette Model. Among Japanese photographers, I must cite, first of all, Daidō Moriyama, who belonged to the renowned “Provoke” movement.
Photographic production in Japan from the 50s onwards is extraordinary. Petersen is a curious man. A “visual voyager”, he likes to observe everything. He seeks inspiration and enjoys the masters of 17th-century Dutch painting, as well as the work of contemporary artists such as Marlene Dumas and Lucian Freud. Petersen is attracted to Japanese literature, to authors like Haruki Murakami. He also finds his inspiration in his own workshops and the dialogue that takes place with the participants.
In your verbal discourse, at times, a certain contempt for academicism in photography is denoted.
-I mean then that, at the moment of photographing, the intellect is not valid, only the emotional. In the end, the intellect has very little to do with the visual. The image has to do with the emotional, with what you feel in your heart and in your stomach. When I photograph, I try to leave my head and the rational aside.
International criticism has widely recognized Anders Petersen’s work in the last ten years. Café Lehmitz from Hamburg is his best-known book and the most famous image is Lilly and Rosen, used on the cover of Rain Dogs by American musician Tom Waits. But he also has critical detractors, who point out that there is in Petersen’s work a certain romanticism of marginalized groups of society, as the most authentic. Petersen argues that “I’m interested in people, it doesn’t matter the nationality, to which generation or to which social stratum they belong, what’s important are the people”.
-How do you present yourself when you photograph?
-Never as a photographer. First I’m interested in the person, I establish a dialogue, then the photograph. That’s why I work with small cameras. Besides, the act of photographing has little to do with photography, it speaks to us first of all about the person behind the camera. It’s about formulating our temperament, experiences, ultimately our personality.
Text: Patricio Salinas A. Published in El Mercurio, Santiago. August 30, 2014