Du mich auch, published by Journal in 2002, gathers Anders Petersen’s photographs made in Hamburg and Stockholm in the late 1960s. The book looks back across several decades, but its subject is not nostalgia in any simple sense. Petersen describes images that return him to encounters marked by kinship, fear, curiosity and solidarity—experiences in which photography was secondary to meeting people and entering unfamiliar realities. The photographs remain rooted in those encounters while being seen from a later, altered perspective.

The work is especially compelling in its refusal of polished moral conclusions. Petersen distrusts neatly formulated principles, inherited guilt and photography that behaves like a string of attractive adjectives. Instead, he values the provisional intimacy of private diaries and family albums. That attitude shapes the book’s social field: bar workers, petty criminals, dockers, street sellers, housewives, performers, war veterans and others associated with St. Pauli appear not as types arranged to illustrate an argument, but as people whose presence gradually forms a community. The camera’s proximity carries both affection and unease, allowing trust, vulnerability and resistance to remain visible at once.

Du mich auch is therefore best read as a sustained conversation between an early body of work and the photographer’s later consciousness. Its significance lies in the tension between immediate contact and retrospective understanding, between individual fragility and the strength a group can provide. For collectors, the book offers a concentrated statement of Petersen’s human and photographic method: direct without being declarative, intimate without becoming sentimental, and attentive to lives that conventional social narratives often leave at the margins. It is a serious 2002 hardcover in German, issued by Journal, and a distinctive record of how personal memory can reframe documentary photographs without closing their questions.