Per-Olow Anderson was a Swedish photographer who is now nearly forgotten. In his time, he was known in many parts of the world, but less so in his home country. Perhaps because it was the world that was his field of work, while his homeland mostly served as a place for brief visits between photo assignments.

P-O, as he was called in his closest circle, was born in 1921 in Stockholm. The story of his life is so rich in content that it is hardly comprehensible. At just sixteen, he went to Spain to document the civil war there. A few years later, he travelled with some of the Swedish volunteers to Norway to participate in the Norwegian resistance movement. He was captured by the Germans and held in Grini before being transferred to the concentration camp Dachau. There he spent six months 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 plane was hit, and Anderson ended up severely injured in a hospital in England. Thus, his flying career came to an end.

But Per-Olow Anderson continued his travels to various war zones around the world. He was present during the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and three years later, he was involved in the landings in Normandy in 1944. There he met Robert Capa again, whom he had gotten to know during the Spanish Civil War. When Capa was killed by a mine in Indochina in 1954, Anderson was by his side.

In the 1950s, Anderson began working in the Middle East, primarily in Egypt. He became close friends with 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' miserable existence there. This resulted in the photo book "They are human too..." published in the USA in 1957. In Egypt, he also followed the construction of the massive Aswan Dam and the relocation of the Abu Simbel temple 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 The Madness of Summer. In his extensive collection of photographs, there are unique images of actors such as Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart, and many others.

Among the Swedish films he followed the production of are Dear John, Black Palm Crowns, The Bookseller Who Stopped Swimming, and The Minister.

Anderson passed away in 1989, but his extensive collection of images has been preserved.