Since the 1960s Anders Petersen has traveled extensively and photographed life beyond the margins of polite society for his acclaimed City Diaries. Petersen’s is an indiscriminate and intensely empathetic eye, one shaped by a fundamental connection with those he photographs—“To me, it’s all about people … what they do, what they believe, their dreams, hopes, visions and virtues.” His subjects—a world including prostitutes, transvestites, alcoholics and nighttime lovers, intimacy and conflict, joy and melancholy in equal measure—reveal his passion to identify and engage with subcultures and “life in the shadows,” not merely to document them, discovering the gritty in the beautiful and the beautiful in the gritty, in impressionist images of deep blacks and stark contrasts.