The Swedish photographer’s portrait captures the human side of Hamburg’s seedier environs
‘Every night, he would come to Cafe Lehmitz to see his friends, but mostly to see Lilly,” recalled photographer Anders Petersen of the man in this image. Known to fellow patrons as Rose, because of the tattoo on his chest, he would turn up at the Hamburg bar smartly dressed having come from a nearby restaurant, where he worked as a waiter. In another photo, perhaps taken earlier the same night, we see Rose in a well-cut suit, cigarette in his left hand, gazing intently at Lilly across a table. Here, he’s shed his jacket, shirt and tie, and is cuddling up to the object of his affections, his torso laid bare.
Petersen is a revered Swedish portraitist known for getting under the skin of his subjects, many of whom are, as curator Gerry Badger puts it in the afterword to a new book of Petersen’s early work, “bruised by life, or likely to be”.
In 1967, Petersen was searching for people to photograph in Hamburg’s red light district when he was introduced to Cafe Lehmitz, a haunt of dockers, sex workers and outsiders of various kinds. He spent the next three years returning to the bar, sometimes sleeping in the kitchen, to document its clientele. Their portraits formed a seminal book, Café Lehmitz, which Petersen published in 1978, as well as an exhibition at the bar where he gave away many of the prints for free.
Another great chronicler of the marginalised, Tom Waits, used this image for the cover of his 1985 album Rain Dogs. So harmonious was the match that many assumed Rose was Waits himself (there’s a certain resemblance) though the singer is far too guarded to reveal himself so starkly to his audience.
A criticism that’s often levelled at artists who trawl the fringes of society is that their work ends up being voyeuristic or exploitative. Petersen avoids that; his regard for the patrons of Cafe Lehmitz radiates from the frame. “It was OK to be desperate, to be tender,” he once said of the bar. “There was a great warmth and tolerance in this destitute setting.”
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Anders Petersen: Early Portraits is published by Journal Photobooks
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