Anders Petersen Rome

Anders Petersen (born 1944) has been photographing the city of Rome since the mid-1980s. He has returned numerous times, and in 2005 he was invited for the Rome Commission, a prestigious commission that has previously been awarded to leading photographers such as Josef Koudelka, Graciela Iturbide, Alec Soth and many others. He returned in 2012, and decided to photograph his lover, Julia, who was briefly visiting him there. Rome begins with Petersen's portraits of Julia, which develop into a broader investigation of the city's lesser-known monuments and byways, its cars, bars and citizens, as Petersen revisits the locations he had documented seven years previously, acutely conscious of his own mortality. These photographs, mostly taken over the course of one week with a small, unobtrusive camera, constitute a fascinating culmination in Petersen's love affair with Rome.