Stevenson once consigned Soho to a nightmare — “a district of some city in a nightmare,” in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Anders Petersen walked the same streets in 2011 and came back with something else entirely. Invited by The Photographers’ Gallery as part of a series of off-site artist commissions supported by Bloomberg, he spent four weeks living inside the district’s creative underbelly rather than passing through it.

That residency shapes the pictures. Petersen works in coarse black and white, close in and unflinching, and the intimacy is deliberately diaristic: streets, pubs, cafés, and the private homes of people who live there. Four weeks is a short time to earn that kind of access, and the book’s tension comes from how quickly the lens moves between the public room and the domestic one, treating both as equally legible.

Soho belongs to Petersen’s ongoing City Diaries, in which a place is approached as a set of encounters rather than a thesis. The London chapter keeps the same method while changing the terrain, setting a long literary reputation of the area against the everyday life he actually found. It is a body of work about a specific quarter at a specific moment, made under a commission that tied it to an institution and a date.

MACK published the resulting book in 2012: 124 pages, debossed linen hardcover, 17.5 × 26.5 cm. The format is modest and the sequencing carries the argument, which is what makes it worth a collector’s shelf. It sits inside a named series, it documents a defined residency, and its rough, high-contrast printing preserves the register of the photographs rather than polishing it away — qualities that matter more here than any claim about scarcity.