Hamburg, 1967 – 1970
 
From 1967 to 1970, Anders Petersen photographed the life of a bar in Hamburg’s Reeperbahn, Cafè Lehmitz, teeming with prostitutes, sailors, transvestites, dropouts and petty criminals that went to make up a warm-hearted family of non-conformists with whom he identified.
People drank, danced, loved each other, cried, fought, sang. Anders lived there with them, took pictures on the fly and painted a moving portrait of a drifting humanity that he deeply loved.
First published in Germany in 1978, Cafè Lehmitz is considered a seminal book, one of the classics of post-war European photography, which also entered pop culture thanks to a photograph used by Tom Waits for the cover of his 1985 album Rain Dogs.
 
 
“When I discovered Anders Petersen it was 1985 and I felt I had found a compatriot. A fellow tracker who was working my neck of the woods, an artist whose pictures revealed as much about him as they did about his subjects’ continual condition. He captures something with his eye I could hear, I could smell and I could taste. They are revealing something, something tragically and comically human. His subjects met him halfway….they brought the flesh and bone and he gave them his beating heart. These are people who do not care there is a camera right there.”
Tom Waits
 
(Excerpt from the foreword written by Tom Waits in the new edition of the book Cafè Lehmitz, Prestel Publishing, 2023)