Café Lehmitz
Anders Petersen
In the seventies and eighties I was a huge fan of songwriter Tom Waits. I especially loved his 1985 album Rain Dogs. Possibly his best album. I liked not only the music but also the album cover. I found out it was a image made by Anders Petersen taken from his photobook Café Lehmitz. From that moment on I got interested in photography and especially photobooks.
Anders Petersen is a Swedish photographer, born in 1944 and based in Stockholm. He makes intimate and personal-documentary style black-and-white photographs. As it turned out Café Lehmitz is one of the most revered photobooks of all time. Something I didn’t know when I listened to Tom Waits’ music. The images have become classics of their genre. Their candidness remain as eloquent today as when they were first published in 1978.
Anders Petersen was eighteen years old when he first visited Hamburg. Chanced up Café Lehmitz and established friends that made an impact on his life. Café Lehmitz was a not so very respectable beer joint at the end of the Reeperbahn in Hamburg, Germany. It was a meeting point and often also the end of the road for many who worked in Hamburg’s red-light district: prostitutes, pimps, transvestites, workers and petty criminals.
In 1968 Petersen returned to Café Lehmitz, found new “regulars” and renewed contact. One evening when he was hanging out in Lehmitz someone grabbed his camera from the table where he was sitting and started taking pictures. Petersen used the opportunity to photograph the place and its denizens. The café exuded a kind of world-weary decadence. And Petersen documented it: candidly, warmly and non-judgementally. He captured the authentic whiff of downbeat urban life.
These sentiments and down-on-their-luck humans we also find in the songs of Tom Waits. Now, 45 years after the book was first published, there is a new edition from Prestel with a foreword by Tom Waits.
Café Lehmitz
Photographer: Anders Petersen
Publisher: Schirmer/Mosel
Originally published in 1978, reissued in 2023 by Prestel
Hardcover with jacket, 112 pages, 21,5 x 24 cm, 88 b/w illustrations
Considered as one of the greatest photobooks of all time by Source Magazine
Mentioned in The Photobook: A History Volume 1, edited by Martin Parr and Gerry Badger