Anders Petersen photographed Stockholm from 2015 to 2018, directing his attention toward both its inhabitants and its changing urban spaces. Published by Max Ström in 2019, Stockholm brings those four years together in black and white. It is Petersen’s first extended portrait of his native city, made during a period of rapid expansion and shaped less as a civic survey than as an encounter with daily life.

The book moves across ages, moods and social settings. A desolate street under falling snow appears alongside public celebration; a dachshund parade in Gärdet sits within the same broad field of observation as an operating theatre in Danderyd and New Year’s Eve at Skeppsbron. Such shifts prevent Stockholm from settling into a single identity. Quiet, festivity, sorrow and affection coexist, while people and objects are approached with the same alertness to fleeting association.

Petersen is known for intimate documentary work in environments including Café Lehmitz in Hamburg, psychiatric hospitals, circuses, prisons and Rome. Here, proximity carries a different charge: the photographer is not entering an unfamiliar milieu but reconsidering the city in which he is based. His energetic images retain the immediacy of street photography, yet the sustained four-year span allows ordinary incidents and seasonal changes to accumulate into a layered record of Stockholm in the late 2010s.

At 368 pages, this paperback gives that accumulation substantial room. Its importance for a serious photobook collection lies not in a claim to comprehensive urban history, but in the meeting of subject, duration and authorship: a photographer long associated with psychologically close observation finally turns that method upon his own city. Stockholm expands the context in which Petersen’s work can be read, while preserving the unresolved contrasts—between solitude and crowds, stillness and commotion—that make the book more than a conventional city portrait.