PER-OLOW ANDERSON (1921-1989): "Audrey Hepburn 1955".

Image size approx. 40x40 cm Numbered 3/10, stamp signed on verso with the photographer's copy right stamp, archival pigment print.

Audrey Hepburn, on the set of War and Peace in 1955.

"photographed 1955 in Italy during the Paramount production of the motion picture War and Peace" HISTORY: Per-Olow Anderson was a Swedish photographer who is now almost forgotten. In his time, he was known across large 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 functioned as a place for short visits between photo assignments.
PO, as he was called in the closest circle, was born in 1921 in Stockholm. The story of his life is so rich in content that it can hardly be understood. Already at the age of sixteen, he went to Spain to document the civil war there. A few years later, he went with some of the Swedish Spanish volunteers to Norway to participate in the Norwegian resistance movement. He was arrested by the Germans and imprisoned in 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 made contact with the British Air Force, who employed him as a photographer and trained him as a pilot. During a flight mission, his plane was hit and the PO ended up seriously injured in hospital in England. That was the end of the flying career.
But PO continued his travels to the world's various hotbeds of war. He was with the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, and three years later he was with the Normandy landings in 1944. There he met again Robert Capa whom he had gotten to know during the Spanish Civil War. When Capa was killed by a mine in Indochina in 1954, PO was by his side.
During the 1950s, PO began working in the Middle East, especially in Egypt. He became close friends with Nasser and also came into contact with the Palestinian freedom struggle after the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948. In 1956 he was in Gaza and documented the miserable existence of the refugees there. It resulted in the photo book "They are human too." which was published in the US in 1957. In Egypt, he also followed the construction of the gigantic Aswan Dam and the relocation of the Abu Simbel Temple in the mid-60s.
But PO also had other strings to his lyre. During the 50s and 60s he worked as a photographer for film companies such as United Artists, Paramount Pictures and Sandrews. He documented the filming of a long series of blockbusters, such as War and Peace, Alexander the Great and Summer's Folly. In his treasure of images left behind, there are unique images of actors such as Katharine Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton, Sophia Loren, Humphrey Bogart and others.
Among the Swedish films he followed the filming of are Dear John, Black Palm Crowns, The Book Seller Who Stopped Bathing and The Minister.
But the story of PO Anderson's incredible life also contains many other elements such as his passion for sports cars and hot air balloons.
PO died in 1989, and his extensive image collection is preserved. A fantastic cultural and historical document that deserves a better fate than oblivion.