ArtistSwedish
Per-Olow Anderson
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Per-Olow Anderson was born in Stockholm in 1921. As a teenager, still only sixteen years old, he travelled to Spain to document the Civil War - an early sign of the restless, frontline instinct that would define his career. He later joined a group of Swedish Spain veterans who crossed into Norway to support the Norwegian resistance after the German occupation. He was captured, interned at Grini prison camp, and subsequently transferred to Dachau concentration camp, where he spent roughly six months before being released in a prisoner exchange.
While in Norway, Anderson had made contact with the British Royal Air Force, which employed him as a photographer and gave him pilot training. His flying career ended when his aircraft was hit and he was badly injured, hospitalised in England. He recovered and resumed his work as a photographer, and by 1941 was present at the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. In 1944 he was at the Normandy landings, where he worked alongside Robert Capa, whom he had first met during the Spanish Civil War. When Capa was killed by a landmine in Indochina in 1954, Anderson was nearby.
During the 1950s and 1960s Anderson built a parallel career as a still photographer on major film productions. He worked for United Artists, Paramount Pictures, and the Swedish studio Sandrews, documenting films including "War and Peace", "Alexander the Great", and "Summertime" (United Artists, 1955). His archive contains photographs of Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, Anita Ekberg, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, and Humphrey Bogart, many taken on set in Italy and Venice. These images record both the stars and the physical atmosphere of large-scale productions of the period.
In 1957 Henry Regnery Company in Chicago published his photobook "They Are Human Too: A Photographic Essay on the Palestine Arab Refugees". The book documented Palestinian refugees in Gaza and stands as the most substantial statement in Anderson's body of work outside the film world - a direct engagement with a humanitarian crisis at a time when few Western photographers were focusing sustained attention on it. Anderson died in 1989, leaving behind an extensive archive that has only begun to be rediscovered.
On the Swedish auction market, Anderson's prints have appeared almost exclusively at Bukowskis Stockholm and Bukowskis Västberga, with a smaller number at Stockholms Auktionsverk Magasin 5. The 14 items recorded in this database are all archival pigment prints - typically numbered editions of 5 - depicting film-set portraits from the mid-1950s. Realised prices range from roughly 237 SEK for Swedish actor portraits to 620 SEK for Audrey Hepburn, reflecting a market that has yet to fully price the historical significance of the collection.