Per-Olow Anderson was a Swedish photographer who is now almost entirely forgotten. During his lifetime, he was known across much of the world, but less so in his native country. Perhaps this was because the world was his workplace, while Sweden mainly served as a place for brief visits between photographic assignments.

P-O, as he was known among those closest to him, was born in Stockholm in 1921. The story of his life is so full of incident that it is almost difficult to comprehend. At just sixteen, he travelled to Spain to document the Civil War. A few years later, he travelled to Norway with several of the Swedish volunteers who had fought in Spain, to join the Norwegian resistance movement. He was captured by the Germans and imprisoned at Grini before being transferred to the Dachau concentration camp. He spent six months there before being released in a prisoner exchange.

During his time in Norway, he had established contact with the British Air Force, which employed him as a photographer and trained him as a pilot. During a flight mission, his aircraft was hit, and Anderson ended up seriously injured in hospital in England. This brought his flying career to an end.

Per-Olow Anderson nevertheless continued to travel to the world’s various theatres of war. He was present during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and three years later took part in the Normandy landings in 1944. There he met Robert Capa once again, having first become acquainted with him during the Spanish Civil War. When Capa was killed by a mine in Indochina in 1954, Anderson was by his side.

During the 1950s, Anderson began working in the Middle East, particularly in Egypt. He became a close friend of Nasser and also came into contact with the Palestinian liberation struggle following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In 1956, he was in Gaza documenting the refugees’ wretched living conditions. This resulted in the photobook They are human too…, published in the United States in 1957. In Egypt, he also documented the construction of the enormous Aswan Dam and the relocation of the Abu Simbel temples in the mid-1960s.

But Per-Olow Anderson had other strings to his bow. During the 1950s and 1960s, he worked as a photographer for film companies including United Artists, Paramount Pictures and Sandrews. He documented the production of a long succession of major films, including War and Peace, Alexander the Great and Summer Madness. His photographic legacy contains unique images of actors such as Katherine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart and many others.

Among the Swedish films whose production he documented were Dear John, Black Palm Crowns, The Bookseller Who Gave Up Bathing and The Minister.

Anderson died in 1989, but his extensive photographic collection has been preserved.