Anders Petersen

Christer Strömholm

Petersen entered Christer Strömholm’s photography school in Stockholm in 1966 and, around the same time, helped found Saftra, a group oriented toward socially critical reportage.^*1 At Place Blanche in Paris, Strömholm maintained long friendships with trans women and made photographs from shared life without classifying “unusual people” as categories observed from outside. Foto Colectania has presented Les Amies de Place Blanche and Café Lehmitz together as teacher-and-student series, emphasizing empathy, sustained involvement, and photobook sequencing as shared concerns.^*16 Moderna Museet likewise places Strömholm’s school in relation to Otto Steinert’s teaching of Subjektive Fotografie and identifies Petersen as one of the students who most clearly carried forward Strömholm’s subjective approach.^*20 What Petersen inherited was less the appearance of dense black prints than the acceptance of the photographer’s own feeling and relation to the subject as part of the documentary situation.

Ed van der Elsken

Ed van der Elsken’s 1956 Love on the Left Bank edited youth, lovers, bars, and bohemian life on Paris’s Left Bank into a photo-novel centered on one character instead of a sequence of anonymous reportage. Petersen later described the book as a kind of “school” for him and spoke of learning the power of the photobook to build personal experience into a self-contained world.^*17 Café Lehmitz has no fictional protagonist, but it is not simply an accumulation of single photographs. Embraces, fights, dancing, sleep, and exchanged looks are sequenced so that shared time in the bar becomes the unit of editing. From Strömholm came a way of forming relationships; from van der Elsken, the subjective chain of the photobook. Café Lehmitz joins the two in another form.

Café Lehmitz

From the period when Petersen began photographing at Café Lehmitz around 1967, the camera was not a one-way recording device. In his recollection, cameras passed from person to person in the bar; customers photographed one another, and the relationship began with Petersen himself also being photographed.^*6 He returned to the bar whenever he was in Hamburg, sometimes sleeping in the kitchen, and photographed regulars, lovers, sex workers, sailors, and others who spent the night there.^*6 The German Society for Photography describes the project as an early example of what would later be called “personal documentary,” foregrounding lived experience and the photographer’s relation to the people photographed.^*4 The close-range images arose from remaining in the same place and sharing the acts of photographing and being photographed, not from first defining a “marginal community” and then approaching it from outside. At Café Lehmitz, the usual journalistic separation between photographer and subject becomes unstable. ROSPHOTO has described the series as a classic of subjective photography rooted in Petersen’s entry into the regulars’ everyday lives.^*5

350 Prints on the Wall

Petersen did not wait until the Café Lehmitz photographs were finished and then take them exclusively into museums. He recalled covering the bar’s walls with about 350 prints so that the people in them could take whichever photographs they wanted.^*6 In another interview he described photographing the bar’s people like a “family album” and said he did not want to separate the images from their lives.^*7 This exchange means that the embraces, sleep, drunkenness, injuries, and nudity later seen in museums and books were made under circumstances different from a secret archive owned only by the photographer. Trust among participants and the gaze of anonymous viewers after publication remain separate questions. The ethical tension of Café Lehmitz lies in the coexistence of genuine intimacy during production and the possibility of voyeurism once the images circulate publicly.

Close Range and Deep Blacks

The Café Lehmitz photographs are known for deep blacks, coarse grain, bodies cut by the edge of the frame, and flash used at close range; Aperture describes them as bold, intimate black-and-white images produced through several years of immersion.^*18 Petersen himself, however, locates the center of photography in being alive—with desire, dreams, and wounds—more than in a stylistic formula, and says an image must be believable to him.^*8 The pictures followed years of returning to the same bar, being photographed by customers, and giving prints back. Isolated from that process, heavy black and proximity can turn the subject into a dramatic “outsider”; within the process, the photographer himself was also part of the conditions that made the image possible. The roughness of the photographs follows from bodily proximity and low light; it does not function merely as an accent on social marginality.

The Institution Trilogy

After Café Lehmitz, Petersen spent extended periods in a prison, a home for older people, and a psychiatric hospital, producing Fängelse, Rågång till kärleken, and Ingen har sett allt. Nationalmuseum groups these works as an “Institution Trilogy” and emphasizes the time he spent in closed environments in order to come close to the people living there.^*3 Petersen himself has connected these projects to “personal connections,” including the experience of entering a home for older people after his father’s death.^*1 The photographs therefore do more than denounce institutions from outside. Personal fear and family experience become the points of entry through which he spends time inside and photographs ordinary relations there. Subjectivity and social record operate together: acknowledging why the photographer is present becomes part of the documentary method.

Editing the Photobook

Café Lehmitz was published by Schirmer/Mosel in 1978 and became a starting point for Petersen’s sustained use of the photobook. The ICP Library holds bibliographic records for the first and later editions.^*10 The German Society for Photography lists the 1978 book among the publisher’s defining titles and describes its international circulation through the sequence of the book as well as exhibitions.^*11 Petersen makes very large numbers of photographs, so the emotional relation created between adjacent images matters more than a single representative picture. In Dazed he has discussed editing from numerous contact sheets down to a few hundred photographs and the importance of building chains between them.^*9 A BnF retrospective catalogue assembled roughly 300 works from the 1960s onward, while Nationalmuseum treats Café Lehmitz and the Institution Trilogy as continuous through both books and exhibitions.^*12 Nationalmuseum identifies the desire to “come close” and a shared human condition as concerns sustained through changing locations by the way the photographs are edited into publications.^*3

Soho and City Diary

In Soho, photographed in London in 2011, Petersen again entered a specific urban district as he had at Café Lehmitz, while addressing the contemporary entertainment quarter on its own terms. MACK describes the commission as an immersion in Soho’s present.^*13 City Diary mixes photographs from Stockholm, Tokyo, St. Petersburg, and other cities across time and place into a personal visual diary. Steidl records the project’s 2012 Paris Photo–Aperture PhotoBook Award and its later expansion into a seven-volume series.^*14 The Hasselblad Foundation’s 2024 retrospective likewise organized six decades of photographs as a flow across time and cities, treating people, animals, bodies, and night as reflections of Petersen’s own life.^*1

Intimacy and Voyeurism

Petersen’s photographs emphasize trust with the people he photographs, yet their images of drunkenness, nudity, wounds, and social marginality in strong contrast do not eliminate the possibility of a voyeuristic gaze from later viewers. ROSPHOTO has described his long-term immersion and solidarity as an “anti-voyeuristic” method.^*5 A comparison with Nan Goldin shows that each photographer arrives at “intimacy” through a different relationship to the people photographed. Goldin has said that her relations with friends and lovers existed before the photographs, and she turned her own social world into the diary-like editing of The Ballad of Sexual Dependency.^*19 Petersen also builds relationships first, but in Café Lehmitz and the Institution Trilogy he enters a specific place from outside and forms relationships through extended stays after entering from outside. Goldin’s work is autobiographical community photography; Petersen’s retains the ethical tension of how a photographer enters another community, leaves it, and later publishes the photographs. In 2003, he was named Photographer of the Year at the Rencontres d’Arles, and in 2008 he received the German Society for Photography’s Dr. Erich Salomon Prize.^*15 In its award statement, the DGPh identifies the sustained approach to people and communities that begins with Café Lehmitz as a continuing feature of his photography.^*2 In a Dazed interview, Petersen likewise places curiosity about his subjects and questions about himself within the same act of photographing, without reducing intimacy to a visual effect.^*9