"These pictures are from every time and from every place. When I look at my contact sheets I often lose myself in memories that I share with the people I photographed. Throughout the years these pictures have become my private diary, with a taste and a language of its own. A small world inhabited by my very own, very real people. For me it is interesting to find that condensed and tender moment. It's an entry into what I'm doing today; discovering desires and memories from the past and mixing them with what I encounter in the present. It's all about identifying and presence." - Anders Petersen
Anders Petersen and Jacob Aue Sobol are two of my favorite photographers. They are contemporaries and like-minded souls — a generation apart but connected with similar kinds of compassion and curiosity about human existence. So it's a treat to see this new book that features Petersen in one part and Sobol in the other. Their styles are often so similar it could be easy to mistake one's photographs for the other's, but here, the viewer can start to discern the telling differences while appreciating similarities.
They both practice a form of photographic expression that might be called "intimate documentary". They bring us in very very close to what attracts them.
As Gerry Badger writes in his essay for the book:
"They are making records of experience, not simply reflecting their own lives, but their experience of people and places, and a particular kind of relationship with them. That is at the heart of the work of both photographers, and it is the precise nature of this relationship, or interaction, that not only defines the nature of the imagery, but the audience's reaction to it... From the point of view of Petersen and Sobol, there is a compulsion to photograph people at the edge, on the edge of sanity, at the edges of society... the strength of their work [is] its ambiguity — not so much moral ambiguity — but a psychological ambiguity that is genuinely complex."
This book is beautifully designed. The black-and-white images could not look better on a printed page, and each image is worth savoring. Highly recommended.
— Jim Casper
© text taken from http://lensculture.com/articles/anders-petersen-veins