Published by Max Ström in 2013, Anders Petersen gathers more than 250 photographs from across the Swedish photographer’s career, extending from his debut book, Gröna Lund, to The City Diaries. At 383 pages, the monograph was presented at publication as the most extensive survey of his work to date. Its breadth makes it less a summary of isolated achievements than a sustained account of the subjects and relationships to which Petersen repeatedly returned.

Petersen’s documentary practice is closely associated with black-and-white portraits made in socially intimate settings. People living at the edges of conventional respectability—among them sex workers, transvestites, drinkers and drug users—appear alongside lovers and other figures absorbed in private exchanges. The photographs are direct but not merely confrontational. Their defining tension lies in the meeting of rough circumstance with evident warmth: vulnerability is shown without being reduced to spectacle, while physical closeness carries its own uncertainty and force.

The selection places these recurrent motifs within the longer development of Petersen’s work. Rather than confining attention to a single celebrated project or period, it allows the reader to consider how portraiture, documentary observation and emotional proximity persist across distinct bodies of photographs. Hasse Persson contributes a concise biographical text addressing Petersen’s life, working methods and ideas; an essay by curator and critic Urs Stahel situates the photography within a broader international perspective. Together, these texts provide historical and methodological bearings without displacing the images.

For a serious photobook collection, the volume’s significance rests in this combination of range and interpretation. It offers a substantial view of an artist for whom the photobook has been a recurring form, while preserving the complexity of a practice built on encounter rather than detached observation. The book deserves attention not as a substitute for Petersen’s individual projects, but as a framework through which their shared human concerns—and their differences—can be studied together.