In 1966 Anders Petersen enrolled at Christer Strömholm’s photography school in Stockholm. Strömholm went through his student’s contact sheets and pencilled a C beside the few frames he could accept. Petersen copied some of those marked negatives, then kept searching, and found himself drawn to other pictures that neither man had much regarded before. Early Portraits grows out of that second look, and out of the uncertainty that produced it.

The photographs were made between 1967 and 1970 in Paris, Genoa, Stockholm and Hamburg; many are published here for the first time. Sixty-four black-and-white plates carry the work, and the volume runs to 151 pages. Journal issues it in a first edition dated 2025, with Gösta Flemming as editor and book design by Johan Renck.

Petersen’s portraits are close, unguarded encounters, and Gerry Badger’s afterword treats him as one of the few photographers who can fairly be called a great portraitist. The book’s interest is not only confirmation of that reputation. Its selection is itself the subject: pictures once set aside, revisited decades later by the photographer who made them, who notes that the eye grows softer and more forgiving with age and that contact sheets can open onto another reading.

For a collector, the case for the book is concrete rather than speculative. It documents a formative period, drawing on negatives that stayed unpublished, and it does so through a collaboration between photographer, editor and designer rather than as a retrospective sampling. Read alongside the Strömholm episode, it shows how a young photographer’s early judgments were first borrowed, then discarded, then re-examined. That record of apprenticeship and revision is what gives these portraits their weight.