Rome, a diary 2012, Anders Petersen

Rome, A Diary 2012.
Photographs by Anders Petersen.
Punctum, 2012. 9 pp., 9 duotone illustrations, 8¼x10¼".

Publisher's Description


Anders Petersen comes back to photograph Rome seven years after his “Commission”. This time round, his work is different and yet the same. Petersen is more fragile; the season beckons him to Rome with one fixed thought: love. He wants to photograph people who love one another. In reality, he is looking for his own love: Julia. She arrives and stays for a week. She becomes the key with which Anders unlocks the city. It all starts with his portraits of Julia, and then proceeds through a timeless world with which the city complies, in what seems to be the very same Rome that Anders and Julia encountered many years ago when, fresh out of adolescence, they visited the city: old cars, lesser-known monuments, the zoo, a variety of animals and events, never-changing Ostia, bars, and many people. Everything resolves itself through strolls through the city, returning to the same spots as in the winter of 2005: the same bar in Piazza Vittorio, the same customers, the same friends. And going into people’s houses as Petersen seeks organic unity: faces, bodies, tattoos, all photographed with a small camera (“I don’t want to look like a photographer; I don’t want to put up that barrier”). Then Julia comes, stays for a week, leaves. During the week they spend together, the work finds its starting point (as novelists have long known, the starting point is not always at the beginning), as well as its end point. Anders stays on for a few more days, but then he can’t take any more and four days before the month comes to an end he heads back home. Now he must work his way through the photos, look through the hundred rolls as if building some kind of organic material, as he seeks his Julia.