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

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

During his time in Norway, he had made contact with the British air force, which employed him as a photographer and trained him as a pilot. During a flying mission, his aircraft was hit and Anderson ended up seriously injured in a hospital in England. This marked the end of his flying career.

Per-Olow Anderson nevertheless continued to travel to the world’s various war zones. He was present during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and three years later took part in the D-Day landings in Normandy in 1944. There, he met Robert Capa again, whom he had first got to know during the Spanish Civil War. When Capa was killed by a landmine 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 movement following the establishment of the state of Israel in 1948. In 1956, he was in Gaza, documenting the refugees’ wretched living conditions there. This resulted in the photobook They are human too…, which was 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 during the mid-1960s.

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

Among the Swedish films whose production he documented are Käre John, Svarta palmkronor, Bokhandlaren som slutade bada and Ministern.

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