Café Lehmitz and the Photographs of Anders Petersen: A Portrait of Hamburg’s Red-Light District
- Jan 12, 2025
- 5 min read
Café Lehmitz was never going to end up in a guidebook. It sat on Hamburg's Reeperbahn, in the middle of the city's red light district, and served the sex workers, drifters and dockworkers who made up the neighbourhood's late night crowd. In the late 1960s, a young Swedish photographer named Anders Petersen started drinking there, camera in hand, and ended up producing one of the most intimate and influential bodies of documentary photography ever made.
Learning to See From Christer Strömholm
Petersen's route to Café Lehmitz started years earlier, and it started with someone else's photograph. As a teenager he saw an image of a Montmartre graveyard taken by the Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm, and something about it stuck with him. In 1966 he enrolled at Strömholm's Fotoskolan in Stockholm, the school that would go on to train more than a thousand photographers over its run.
Petersen later described how he actually met Strömholm for the first time. During a school trip, someone banged on his door at three in the morning. Petersen didn't answer at first, officially he wasn't even supposed to be there, but the knocking kept up until he finally opened it. Standing outside was a bald man with a gold ring in his ear, who looked around at the mess in the room, asked to see Petersen's photographs, and told him to come to his office the next morning. Petersen assumed he was about to be thrown out. Instead, Strömholm invited him to join the school. The two remained close for the next four decades, teacher and student turned lifelong friends.
Strömholm's own most famous work, an intimate series photographing transgender women around Paris's Place Blanche in the 1950s, set the tone for the kind of documentary photography he pushed his students toward: personal, unguarded, made from inside a community rather than looking in at it from a distance. That approach shaped everything Petersen did next.
A Camera Gets Passed Around a Bar
Petersen had actually spent time in Hamburg once before, back in 1961, when he stayed in the city as an eighteen year old to learn German and try his hand at writing and painting. He didn't take a single photograph that trip. When he went back in 1967, fresh out of Strömholm's school, he intended to track down old friends from that earlier visit and photograph their lives. Most of them, he was told, were already dead.
What he found instead was Café Lehmitz, and the way he found it has become part of the work's own mythology. Accounts differ slightly on the exact details, but the gist holds: Petersen was sitting in a bar with his camera on the table when a stranger picked it up, snapped a photo of him, and handed it back. Rather than take offence, Petersen kept shooting, turning the camera over to whoever wanted a go and photographing them right back. An old friend named Gertrude, who he ran into around the same time, pointed him toward Café Lehmitz specifically, promising it was full of characters worth photographing. He turned up at 1am the following night and never really left.
He stayed at the café for a solid month at the outset, then kept returning over the next two and a half years, eventually building a body of work exhaustive enough to fill a book. In 1970, before that book existed in any form, Petersen held his first solo show of the material right there at the café, nailing 350 prints directly to the walls for the regulars to see themselves.
The People Behind the Photographs
What set Petersen's photographs apart from a lot of documentary work of the era was how unguarded his subjects were with him. These weren't candid shots stolen from a distance. The regulars at Lehmitz knew him, argued with him, posed for him and occasionally grabbed the camera themselves.
One woman, Uschi, became one of his most striking subjects. Petersen described her as kind and generous, but her life had been shaped by trauma from a young age: raped by a cousin at fourteen, then blamed for it by those around her rather than supported. She turned to sex work not long after.
Petersen's photographs of her carry none of the judgement that framing might suggest elsewhere; they sit alongside images of tenderness, drunkenness, boredom and, in at least one case Petersen later spoke about, real cruelty between a couple that he debated whether to publish at all. He decided the book needed to show that side of the café too, not just the romantic version.
Petersen's work at Lehmitz is often set alongside Ed van der Elsken's Love on the Left Bank, another photobook that turned an urban demimonde into something close to a novel told in pictures. Petersen has acknowledged the comparison while noting his own style has shifted since: where Lehmitz was about capturing atmosphere and milieu, he's said his later work became more direct, more about people he personally identifies with. It's a similar instinct to what E.J. Bellocq brought to his portraits of Storyville's sex workers decades earlier in New Orleans, a documentary eye trained on a red light district that refused to flatten its subjects into types.
From Bar Walls to One of Photography's Great Books
Café Lehmitz the book finally came out in Germany in 1978, and it's since become regarded as one of the most important photobooks ever published. Its reputation has only grown with time. Musician Tom Waits used one of Petersen's Lehmitz images for the cover of his 1985 album Rain Dogs, a record steeped in exactly the kind of bruised, late night atmosphere Petersen had spent years photographing. When Prestel reissued the book in 2023, it was Waits himself who wrote the new foreword, tying the two works together properly for a new generation of readers.
The Reeperbahn itself has changed enormously since Petersen's era there, cleaned up, gentrified and turned into as much a tourist attraction as a working red light district. Café Lehmitz itself is long gone. What Petersen left behind is one of the few honest visual records of who actually populated that world before it changed, photographed by someone the regulars trusted enough to hand their own camera back to.
It's a similar kind of trust that runs through Billy Monk's photographs of The Catacombs, a Cape Town nightclub Monk worked as a bouncer at around the same period, snapping the sailors, sex workers and misfits who drank there. Both men were insiders first and photographers second, and it shows in the work.
