Café Lehmitz by Swedish photographer Anders Petersen was made from 1967 to 1970 at a bar in Hamburg's Reeperbahn/St. Pauli district, portraying the sailors, workers, sex workers, drifters, and other night people who gathered there.
Petersen returned to Hamburg while studying with Christer Strömholm in Stockholm, initially hoping to find friends he had known as a teenager. That search led him to Café Lehmitz, where repeated visits over roughly two and a half years developed into an inquiry into belonging, loneliness, vulnerability, and recognition across social boundaries. Petersen emphasized encounters over detached observation and resisted romanticizing the patrons' difficult circumstances.
Black-and-white photographs move between tightly cropped portraits, embracing or dancing couples, solitary drinkers, and compressed group scenes. Faces and hands emerge under overhead light from dark, smoke-filled interiors crowded with bottles, glasses, tables, worn walls, and a jukebox. Foreground obstructions, diagonal edges, partial bodies, visible grain, and dense blacks produce the sense of a photographer moving within the room rather than observing it from a fixed position. The mood shifts among tenderness, fatigue, celebration, desire, and confrontation.
Petersen worked with a Nikon F and Kodak Tri-X film pushed to 1600 ASA. He opened the lens fully and adjusted among three shutter speeds according to his distance from the bar's central ceiling light, accepting reduced sharpness in the low light. In 1970 he returned photographs to this community by mounting about 350 prints in the café and allowing those pictured to take them.
After an appearance at Les Rencontres d'Arles in 1977, Schirmer/Mosel published Café Lehmitz in 1978 with 88 images, bringing Petersen wider international recognition. Subsequent editions and exhibitions repeatedly revisited the archive, including retrospectives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Münchner Stadtmuseum and the Color Lehmitz exhibitions at Fotografiska in Stockholm and New York. Moderna Museet acquired two series photographs in 1987. In 2008, the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Photographie awarded Petersen the Dr.-Erich-Salomon-Preis, citing the international significance of the 1978 Café Lehmitz book.
