Anders petersen london

Be a thief of ideas, but make them your own! In it, he captured a time and place now long gone: a bar on Hamburg's Reeperbahn where pimps, prostitutes and their clients mixed with transsexuals and pickpockets. The clientele became his surrogate family and the young Petersen even had a fleeting but intense romance with one of the girls who worked the notorious red-light strip.

That's the way it has always been with me. At the request of the Photographers' Gallery in London , Petersen spent just over three weeks shooting in Soho in for the latest in his City Diaries series. He began in March, when it was "too cold at night" and returned in June, when "it was the perfect mix of shop light and sunlight".

He shoots only in black and white and often uses low level flash even during the day to add to the feeling of immediacy and rawness. You can use your imagination more that way — put your own colours into the pictures. Petersen has two basic ways of working: the fleeting snapshot, of which he is a master, and the posed portrait.

For the latter, he haunted the bars, clubs and cafes of Soho, befriending people he liked the look of and asking them to pose for him. I found Soho to be a very open and friendly place full of generous people.

Really, I learned a lot there. He shot in various famous and infamous Soho haunts, from the French House to Blacks private members' club, as well as in several burlesque bars and dingy upstairs rooms where "models" entertain their clientele. Sometimes, he went to peoples' homes or took them back to his hotel room.

Often the results are intimate and edgy, as is his style. One young woman smokes a cigarette held between her toes; another blow-dries her hair, topless, with a very phallic looking hairdryer. There were many tattooed bodies, several exhibitionists, some darkly beautiful urban landscapes and a series of wonderful, almost-romantic portraits of the young and the beautiful going about their daily business.

It is, he says, Soho as a kind of impressionistic self-portrait. In the heart of many big cities, there are now only young people. I think this is sad. Soho, London — where the GIs jived with local girls and forgot about the war ; escaping secretaries laughed all night at the Top Rank ; and needy men in search of sleaze knocked on wooden doors and met lunch-hour strippers with incredible stories of survival and models on the clock — taking care to dodge vicars looking for a flock , for whom sex was a keen field of professional study.

Soho was home to the swingingest streets of 60s London , where besuited gangsters and dolly birds wined and dined — and good-time girls who knew too much threatened world war. The drugs created chaos. Things were better back then, say those in the know, but Soho was often shabby and the meat in the market tasted of regret. Soho is where creativity soared. Still does. You just have to look a bit harder for life between the cracks.

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