“Lehmitz was the first thing I did seriously. It filled me up,” says Anders Petersen. “I really identified with these people and their situation, this group who were outside society. I respected them. I felt very strongly about them.”

 

Petersen’s photographs of Cafe Lehmitz and its customers – regulars in a Hamburg red-light-district dive at the fag end of the 60s – have long been among the most revered of photobooks. First published in 1978, Cafe Lehmitz became part of pop culture when Tom Waits used one as the cover of his 1985 Rain Dogs album.Almost five decades after the photos were shot, the Swedish photographer, now 72, has revised his Lehmitz archive for an exhibition in Paris of previously unseen images

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