In these days of irreversible rancor and decimation, one cannot help but look backward through the lens of a type in fogged nostalgia for the second half of the Twentieth Century, in the years prior to 2001, also embedded fairly as a time of grave uncertainty. Notwithstanding, this was a time when the travails of life under thumb were not constantly held up to one’s face 200 times a day, when the acrimony of the times was embedded in the nastiness of what came before, not what one currently experiences. Horror, atrocity, and decline are all very close today, and perhaps I am misremembering the horrors of those times, the Cold War, the nuclear rush, and unemployment. I was only there for the second half of the second half of that lean and mean century, where all the grain and violence that currently concerns our days was fomented and streamlined.

I think about the Twentieth Century often, having spent half of my life there. I look at the post-war condition of Europe, from where I have lived this half of my life, still deeply American, and wonder how such poor choices could be spread out on the baking sheet of political history, as rotted dough waiting to rise and envelop before its edges burn. I misguide my elegy for the times with music, with bohemian ideas of artistry, of times just before the wall fell, of dirty, crotchety, septic spaces where people would smoke indoors, cackle, and cavort without care, concern, or coercion of their identity by their handheld devices.

Where the reek of polyester and leather jackets comingled with hair spray and halitosis. Where Fassbinder was king, and Hasslehoff had not yet entered into consciousness. Where the RAF and the Munich Olympics were topical, but could be turned off. Where Aldo Moro might be mistaken as a dog food company, for the few people who had dogs as pets, believing them not to be itty-bitty schmoozy-woozy children, but to be custodial floor sweepers, an absorbant for everything that oen could not say to their kids or spuse while puttering in the garage or, more preceisely the cellar workspace, grasy fingers running along weathered linoleum countertops trying to grab a nail with dimionished eyesight in a land in which contacts had not yet been invented for the poor.

The tubercular smell of stale cigarette smoke, no filter, oozing from the bowels of the apartment complex, still riddled, pockmarked with bullet marks, and fading advertisements painted on ascending brick, below, a lot overgrown with weeds and shit emptying out its bowels of trash onto the cobbled streerts, humped rags and blankets in lying in a mound toward the back perhaps concealing living tissue, perhaps not, a veritble necrosis of sorts. Now rebuilt into custom flats for digital nomads working for Google, obsessed with vegan diets, their schmoozy-woozy animal children, and their declining birth rates.

When I look through Early Portraits by Anders Petersen, just as I do when I look through Novemberrejse, by Krass Clement, I am reminded of the twentieth Century and all of the mood and atmosphere, anxiety, and solitary time we had as human beings on the earth, with no tether to the digital 24 hour news cycle, perhaps a phone call here and there, but ultimately knowing where to be and when, with the option of disappearing whenever the call urged. The molasses of memory, impolite and untrustworthy as it can be, calls out in these pictures. As mentioned previously, I can almost smell them.

The grainy, haunting portraits produced by Anders Petersen shape how I interpret his world. I find his ability to project himself onto another person fascinating. There is a respectful distance in most of the photographs, and yet they are so concise and consistent that it is hard ot see them as anything other than a projection of the artist himself. They exude such subjective character that it would be nearly impossible to imagine them being from someone else. In some ways, I could make the bridge to Clements, as mentioned previously, and it would be fair to mention the long reach of Christer Strömholm, a known forebearer, associate, and someone potentially responsible for Petersen’s images from Clichy within the book. From that point on, it becomes harder to find a cult of references suitable for the work.

Throughout this volume of Petersen’s work, one can find their way around his Cafe Lehmitz moment, but outside of a few obvious references, the images used exceed the obvious, and the book, published by the eminent publisher Journal out of Sweden, uses images that are potentially less familiar to the audience for the most part. Whereas my history with Petersen is confined to Cafe Lehmitz, the book expands the territory and gives me something to grab onto beyond that spectacularly well-known volume. My world regarding the impresario is gravely expanded, and though I do not have his other volumes, I feel this is an exceptional tome of portraiture. I would suggest that people who are familiar with his work may still find something within, as the book flows incredibly well, being made of pieces from his different bodies of work, again showing the consistency of his production. I do not expect less from the Journal, Highly Recommended.