Café Lehmitz and the Photographs of Anders Petersen: A Portrait of Hamburg’s Red-Light District
Updated: 2 days ago
Café Lehmitz was never going to end up in a guidebook. It was a scruffy stand-up beer hall on Hamburg's Reeperbahn that never shut, and it served the sex workers, sailors, dockers, pimps, drifters and lonely pensioners of St Pauli at any hour they turned up. Between 1967 and 1970, a young Swede called Anders Petersen drank there night after night with a camera on the table. What came out of it was an amazing photobook, a Tom Waits album cover and a way of photographing people that's still taught in art schools today.
Quick Answers
• What was Café Lehmitz? A round-the-clock dive bar on the Reeperbahn in Hamburg's St Pauli red-light district.
• Who photographed it? Swedish photographer Anders Petersen, born in Stockholm in 1944, over several long stays between 1967 and 1970.
• When was the book published? Café Lehmitz came out in 1978, almost a decade after the pictures were taken. Prestel reissued it in March 2023.
• Is it the Rain Dogs cover? Yes. Petersen's picture of a couple known as Lilly and Rose is on the cover of Tom Waits' 1985 album Rain Dogs.
• Does Café Lehmitz still exist? The original was demolished in the late 1980s. A newer bar called Lehmitz took on the name on the Reeperbahn, and its future has been shaky since late 2025.
A Stamp-Sized Photo and a Stolen Darkroom Key
Petersen's route into photography started with a picture about the size of a postage stamp. As he told 1854 Photography, he spotted it next to a crossword in the daily paper: an empty graveyard on a winter morning with footprints in the snow between the headstones. He read it as the dead going visiting in the night. It turned out to be the work of Christer Strömholm, the Swedish photographer who ran the School of Photography in Stockholm.
How they actually met is a better story than the one that usually gets told. Petersen got hold of a key to the school's darkroom and sneaked in every night for a couple of months, developing and printing without anyone's permission. One night at 3am Strömholm, a small bald man with a gold ring in one ear, was standing at the door. Instead of throwing him out, he asked, "I heard about you. Can I see your pictures?" Petersen was invited to join the school properly, and the two stayed close friends for the rest of Strömholm's life.
Strömholm's own work, especially his pictures of the trans women around Place Blanche in Paris, came from inside a community rather than peering in at it. That's exactly the approach Petersen took with him to Hamburg.
Back to Hamburg and a Camera Nobody Would Leave Alone
Petersen had first seen Hamburg in 1962 as an 18-year-old, spending about six months there learning German. When he came back in 1967 as a 23-year-old student, he was looking for the people he'd known. "I went back there to find my friends and take pictures of their lives," he told Flashbak. Most of them, he was told, were dead or long gone.
One of the few left was a woman called Gertrud, who took him to Café Lehmitz. He arrived at 1am, put his camera down on the edge of a table and watched the regulars start chucking it around between them. Rather than grab it back, he joined in. That set the tone for everything: he wasn't an outsider sneaking shots, he was the bloke at the table the camera kept coming back to. He stayed for a month to begin with, then kept returning every few months for two and a half years. Most accounts date the start to 1967, though the book's publishers and a few reviewers give 1968, so don't be surprised if you see both.
It helped that he genuinely liked the place. "The people had a presence and a sincerity that I myself lacked," he told Dazed. He described Lehmitz to Blind magazine as "a place where they can go to meet friends and not feel so alone." It's the same kind of rough sanctuary that Sammy's Bowery Follies offered New York's drinkers a couple of decades earlier.
Uschi, Rose and the People Behind the Photographs
The regulars weren't anonymous types to Petersen. He knew their names, their stories and their tempers. Uschi was one of his most memorable subjects, a woman he remembered as kind and generous. She'd been raped by a cousin at 14 and was blamed for it by the people around her, and not long afterwards she started working the streets. Petersen's pictures of her don't moralise about any of that.
Then there's the couple on the Rain Dogs cover. The man had a rose tattooed on his chest, which earned him the nickname Rosenkavaljeren. The woman, Lilly, wasn't a conventional beauty but had a pull that made her popular with the men in the bar. The picture catches a brief moment of tenderness and joy between them. A signed print later sold at Bukowskis in Stockholm in 2011 for 30,000 Swedish kronor.
Not everything was tender. Petersen has talked about photographing a man in a big hat being cruel to a woman whose name he's forgotten, and about agonising over whether to publish it. He did, because leaving it out would've turned Lehmitz into a fairy tale. He's also said he was heavily influenced by Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, another photobook that turned a bohemian scene into something closer to a novel.
If you like this kind of insider work, St Pauli had another chronicler in the same era: tattooist Herbert Hoffmann, who photographed the sailors and labourers who came through his shop. And the same instinct runs through E.J. Bellocq's portraits of Storyville's sex workers in New Orleans decades earlier.
An Exhibition Pinned to the Bar Walls
Before there was any book, there was a show at the café itself. In 1970 Petersen pinned 350 prints to the walls of Lehmitz with drawing pins for four days (as Artdoc tells it), and the regulars could take home any picture they recognised themselves in, as Arterritory notes. It was his first ever solo exhibition, and the most important audience he'd ever have was standing at the bar.
That idea of giving the pictures back never really left him. In a 2017 interview with 1854 Photography, he said he'd dreamt since the 1970s of a Lehmitz family album, a version of the work made as a gift to the people in it. The same interview has the lesson he took from those years: photography, he said, "is not about photography."
From Bar Walls to One of Photography's Great Books
Café Lehmitz was finally published by Schirmer/Mosel in Munich in 1978, as a modest 116-page softcover, going by Josef Chladek's photobook archive. Its reputation has grown steadily ever since, and it now sits on pretty much every serious list of the greatest photobooks. Barbican curator Kate Bush (not that one) has called it a "Zeitgeist book", as the PhotoBook Club points out in its deep dive on the book. In 2014, photobook specialist Markus Schaden even rebuilt Café Lehmitz for his photobook museum at the photokina trade fair in Cologne, as FotoTV noted.
Tom Waits picked Petersen's shot of Lilly and Rose for the cover of Rain Dogs in 1985, a record full of exactly the kind of bruised, after-hours characters who drank at Lehmitz. When Prestel reissued the book in March 2023, Waits wrote the new foreword. His line that Petersen "makes pictures that stick to the wall of your imagination and the bottom of your shoe" was picked up by F-Stop Magazine in its review of the edition, which runs to 88 black and white photographs.
There's been more material since. In 2002 Petersen published Du mich auch, a book of previously unseen late-1960s pictures from Stockholm and Hamburg, according to the Hasselblad Foundation. A show called Color Lehmitz toured Fotografiska's galleries in Tallinn and New York between 2020 and 2022, with contact sheets and unseen negatives from the café years.
What Petersen Did Next
Lehmitz set the template for the rest of his career, and so did the way he worked there. Petersen has always said the trick is to drop your guard rather than hide behind the camera, which he's described to Arterritory as "daring to be weak enough." He went on to photograph the Gröna Lund amusement park in Stockholm, then spent years inside closed institutions for a trilogy of books on a prison, an old people's home and a psychiatric hospital. He was named Photographer of the Year at the Rencontres d'Arles festival in 2003 and won the Dr Erich Salomon Prize in 2008, as LensCulture records. In 2024, the year he turned 80, he published City Diary, a book of nearly 150 photographs spanning 60 years of work.
These days he shoots on cheap Contax T3 compacts, and he owns seven of them. He told 1854 Photography they're bad cameras with dodgy focus, which is exactly why he likes them. "The camera is just my tool," he's said, a line Artdoc used to sum up his whole approach. It's the same spirit you find in Jacques Léonard's years with the Gitanos of Montjuïc, or in Billy Monk's snaps of The Catacombs nightclub in Cape Town, where Monk worked the door. They were insiders first and photographers second.
What Happened to Café Lehmitz?
The original Café Lehmitz didn't survive the tidying-up of St Pauli. It was knocked down in the late 1980s, according to Szene Hamburg. A newer bar called Lehmitz later set up at Reeperbahn 22, borrowing the name and a bit of the attitude, with live bands playing on the bar counter, as Kult Kieztouren describes it.
That second Lehmitz has had a rough run lately. After around 20 years it announced it was closing at the end of 2025, then reopened on 1 June 2026, only to shut again within weeks when a pipe burst, t-online reported. Whether it comes back is anyone's guess. Either way, the real Café Lehmitz lives on in Petersen's pictures, which remain one of the few honest records of who actually drank on the Reeperbahn before the tourists and the stag dos took over.
