Book Review: Café Lehmitz by Anders Petersen

blog

Book Review: Café Lehmitz by Anders Petersen

February 28th, 2023 by Cary Benbow

Without knowing it, I’d been exposed to Petersen’s work in the late 1980s when one of his images was chosen for the cover of Tom Wait’s album, Rain Dogs. The album has been described as being about “the urban dispossessed” of New York City, so this perfectly sets the stage for the type of scenes and people captured in Café Lehmitz. Waits writes a new forward for the book being republished in March 2023 by Prestel.

Petersen’s photographs were made in the late 1960s, and Café Lehmitz was first published in 1978. With the comfort and distance of decades gone by, Wait’s songs and Petersen’s images wax nostalgic, so one could easily apply this sentiment to the images in Café Lehmitz. It feels so easy to romanticize the past, but how does the saying go – you can never truly go home again? To quote Thomas Wolfe: ”You can’t go back home to your family, back home to your childhood…back home to the old forms and systems of things which once seemed everlasting but which are changing all the time.”

Surely Petersen could’ve felt the same way when he returned to Hamburg to re-connect with old friends and take pictures of their lives. Petersen had first visited the city and its infamous center of nightlife, the Reeperbahn, as a teenager studying German in 1962. He got to know some of the locals and formed friendships. In 1968, Petersen was a photography student in his 20s in Stockholm, and felt the pull of Hamburg again. “I went back there to find my friends and take pictures of their lives,” he says. “But people told me they were almost all dead.”

One remaining friend invited him to meet at a bar near the red-light district and Petersen brought along his camera. That night sowed the seeds for the project. He photographed people during return trips to Hamburg and Café Lehmitz over the following three years. This project, and later projects like ‘From Back Home’ and ‘City Diary’ helped build his body of work which would establish him as one of Sweden’s most important contemporary photographers.

“Anders Petersen makes pictures that stick to the wall of your imagination and the bottom of your shoe. He captures living moments that stare right back at you” – Tom Waits

Petersen’s images are a personal and subjective portrait of the people in his orbit at the time. A dive bar in Hamburg, Germany is the setting. The barflies, prostitutes, pimps, addicts, lovers, and misfits round out the cast. But the bar could just as easily be anywhere. Due to Petersen’s personal connection to the people shown here, his images overshadow the voyeuristic or problematic nature one might otherwise assign to projects by outsiders focused on marginalized people. His connection to these individuals informs the immediacy and intimacy in the work. Petersen shows a captivating and compassionate look at the tender side of people whose lives are hardened by misfortune or circumstance.

Café Lehmitz by Anders Petersen © Prestel Verlag, Munich · London · New York, 2023
With contributors Tom Waits and Roger Anderson
Hardcover with jacket
112 pages, 21,5 x 24,0 cm,
88 b/w illustrations
Published by Prestel

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

ANDERS PETERSEN, b. 1944, is one of Sweden’s most important contemporary photographers. He has received countless awards throughout his long career and has published more than twenty photo books, including Café Lehmitz and From Back Home, with JH Engström.

TOM WAITS is a celebrated American musician, composer, songwriter and actor.

ROGER ANDERSON was a distinguished journalist and author based in Munich, Germany.

About Cary Benbow

Photographer, Writer, Publisher of Wobneb Magazine

View all posts by Cary Benbow →

Location: Online Type: Book Review

blog