The City Diary exhibition consists of an immersive installation of 48 large-format prints of photographs made by Anders Petersen (born in Sweden in 1944) between 1967 and 2018. According to the will of the artist, who is reiterating the scenographic principle of his very first exhibition in April 1970 at Café Lehmitz in Hamburg, the prints are pinned to the walls, covering them all. All of these photographs will be published in the upcoming volumes #4 to #7 of the famous City Diaries by the Swedish photographer.

City Diaries brings together, in the form of a diary, a vast collection of photographs made by Anders Petersen since the beginning of his career, during his wanderings through the cities of the world. The situations photographed are varied: the behaviour of humans alone or in groups, everyday encounters - with objects, animals, people - or even the spectacles of nature. The viewer can see the artist's position: that of a man who travels the world and who, gifted with an inexhaustible capacity for astonishment, pauses and composes images which each convey a feeling of suspension, of floating, suggesting a questioning, an intimacy between the photographed subject and the author. The photographs in City Diaries give little information about the place where they were made. For as Anne Biroleau, curator of Petersen?s retrospective at Bibliothèque nationale de France in 2013, writes: ?Petersen invents the exterior space and its light, dismisses the picturesque and conventions, and adjusts the world to his own measure.? In all circumstances, Anders Petersen maintains an absolute benevolence, erasing all judgement, to the point of putting any subject, be it a human or an object, on an equal footing with himself. ?I want my images, even when I photograph an apple, to be a self-portrait,? he insists.

The principle of the exhibition, based on mural compositions starting from the corners of the gallery space, is also reminiscent, on a completely different scale, of both the book and the contact sheet, primordial objects for Petersen who, since the 1960s, has never stopped photographing the world on black and white film. ?Because there are more colours in black and white.?

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