Café Lehmitz grew out of the nights Anders Petersen spent between 1967 and 1970 in a small bar near Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. There he photographed its regulars: prostitutes, workers, petty criminals, cross-dressers, alcoholics and people who found in the bar a place to gather. Petersen did not work as a distant observer. He frequented the bar for years and built personal relationships with the people in his photographs, creating an extraordinarily intimate portrait of that community.
 
The images show embraces, alcohol, desire, exhaustion, fights, tenderness and loneliness without turning their subjects into picturesque characters. This closeness is precisely one of the qualities that would later define Petersen’s photography: entering the spaces he photographs and becoming part of them, at least temporarily.
 
This Japanese edition was published by Rat Hole Gallery in Tokyo in 2007 to coincide with the Café Lehmitz exhibition at the gallery. It is a much more compact reinterpretation of the original book published in 1978, with a smaller selection of black-and-white photographs printed full bleed. It also includes a text by Mariko Takeuchi in Japanese and English.
 
Its small format and burgundy cover, designed to resemble an old café menu, make this Rat Hole edition a particularly distinctive version of Café Lehmitz.