Café Lehmitz
On display from October 1 to November 30.
The story of the “Café Lehmitz” series began in 1967, when Anders Petersen started photographing life inside the bar of the same name in Hamburg’s St. Pauli district, near the Reeperbahn. It was a meeting place for local residents, dockworkers, sailors, sex workers, and others who often lived on the margins of society. Petersen kept returning to the bar for nearly three years, spending time with its regulars, building close relationships, and photographing their everyday lives from within, as part of that environment. He later compared the resulting body of work to a family album, emphasising that the people were always what mattered most to him.
The series brings together portraits and scenes from life inside the bar: people talking, drinking, dancing, posing, or simply spending time together. In 1970, Petersen organised the first exhibition of the series at Café Lehmitz itself. Around 350 photographs were pinned above the bar, and visitors who recognised themselves in the images were invited to take the photographs home.
“Café Lehmitz” quickly moved beyond the world of the bar itself. Between 1970 and 1973, the series was shown in Hamburg, Stockholm, Kalmar, Oslo, Gothenburg, and London but an important turning point came with its presentation at Les Rencontres d’Arles in 1977. Soon afterwards, in 1978, the German publisher Schirmer/Mosel released the photobook “Café Lehmitz”. The series later returned in numerous exhibitions and new editions, and in 1985 one of its photographs was used for the cover of Tom Waits’s album “Rain Dogs”.
Since then, “Café Lehmitz” has repeatedly returned to exhibition spaces, from retrospectives at the Bibliothèque nationale de France and Moderna Museet to the “Color Lehmitz” exhibitions at Fotografiska in Stockholm and New York, where contact sheets and the photographer’s notes were also presented. Photographs from the series are now held in the collections of institutions including Moderna Museet, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Anders Petersen’s work will be presented in Lithuania for the first time. The IPMA Festival exhibition will feature the complete set of 52 photographs from the Café Lehmitz series – vintage prints from 1977.