Lehmitz Color

In 1967 Petersen started photographing the customers of a bar called Café Lehmitz in Hamburg. He kept coming there for a period of almost three years and in 1970 Café Lehmitz hosted Petersen's first solo exhibition, with 350 photographs nailed to the wall. All sorts of people went to Cafe Lehmitz: locals, people from the harbour and surrounding cities, as well as a lot of elderly prostitutes. People who went there had often had a hard life and were not accepted anywhere else. Café Lehmitz, first published in 1978, is an affectionate portrayal of the regular visitors of this late night bar, and is highly influential in the history of photography. This new book shows the images that Petersen highlighted and marked on the contact proof sheets of the period, with signs, signals and colours. They have lost that original intention of prominance and of status, their Morse code, their meaning, but they have gained the gesture.