Zoo is a wild ride through Anders Petersen's oeuvre, a racy edit of his work that has animals as its central theme. Whether they be conscious portraits of animals or a haphazard photographic encounter with a woman's legs in python-print tights, Petersen draws out the animal and animalistic in all that he sees. At a typical zoo we are the spectators, peering in on creatures as they go about their existence, mostly oblivious to our presence. Yet in Zoo we find ourselves both behind and before the bars of the cagewith Petersen as the delighted zookeeper.

Autorentext

Born in 1944, Anders Petersen studied photography at Fotoskolan and later at the Institute for Cinema, Radio, Television and Theatre, both in Stockholm. In 1970 he founded the group of photographers Saftra together with Kenneth Gustavsson. Petersen is perhaps best known for his photos of the colorful, often unconventional, patrons of Café Lehmitz in Hamburg's St. Pauli, resulting in his seminal book Café Lehmitz (1978). He has published and exhibited his photography extensively and in 2014 was the subject of a retrospective at the Bibliothéque National de France in Paris, which is now touring in Europe.