“The peo­ple at the Café Lehmitz had a pres­ence and a sin­cer­ity that I my­self lacked. It was okay to be des­per­ate, to be ten­der, to sit all alone or share the com­pany of oth­ers. There was a great warmth and tol­er­ance in this des­ti­tute set­ting!”

“Dur­ing the most acute and in­tense mo­ments of emo­tional re­lease, the cam­era pro­tects you. Yet, there is so much word­li­ness, vul­ner­a­bil­ity, and in­ti­macy in such frank­ness that you are not able to shield your­self from it any­way.”

Café Lehmitz, a bar in Ham­burg in the vicin­ity of the Reeper­bahn, was a meet­ing point for late night rev­ellers and and port work­ers, sailors and sales­men, pros­ti­tutes and vis­i­tors of the red-light dis­trict. An­ders Pe­tersen was 18 years old when he first vis­ited Café Lehmitz. Six years later, he re­turned to Ham­burg as a pho­tog­ra­pher and plunged into the mi­lieu of the café’s reg­u­lars, this im­mer­sion re­sult­ing in a pho­to­graphic se­ries. His pho­tographs, which were first pub­lished in book form in 1978, have be­come clas­sics of sub­jec­tive pho­tog­ra­phy. The se­ries re­minds a fam­ily album cap­tur­ing var­i­ous en­coun­ters with peo­ple in a ha­bit­ual set­ting. The pho­tog­ra­pher lives among them, mak­ing peo­ple trust him and con­sider him a friend. This trust and  sol­i­dar­ity ev­i­dent in the im­ages evoke com­pas­sion while pre­vent­ing voyeurism or false pity aris­ing vis-a-vis a mi­lieu gen­er­ally re­ferred to as “aso­cial.” The “other” world of Café Lehmitz be­comes vis­i­ble as a lively com­mu­nity with its own self-image and dig­nity.

Café Lehmitz was the first of the 25 books pub­lished by the pho­tog­ra­pher. 

The ex­hi­bi­tion Café Lehmitz is put to­gether through the joint ef­forts of An­ders Pe­tersen and the art di­rec­tor of the Novosi­birsk In­ter­na­tional Bi­en­nale of Con­tem­po­rary Pho­tog­ra­phy An­drey Mar­tynov. Some of the pho­tographs are ex­hib­ited for the first time.

Cu­ra­tor Angie Åström

With the sup­port of the Swedish In­sti­tute and the Em­bassy of Swe­den in the Russ­ian Fed­er­a­tion

In the frame­work of the Fes­ti­val of Pho­tog­ra­phy of the Nordic Coun­tries