"The Photographs I Love" 18 – Anders Petersen

“For photography to be good, you must always have one foot in and one foot out.
My problem is that I always end up with both feet inside!”
(Anders Petersen)

 

Anders Petersen. “Lilly and Rose”. “Café Lehmitz”, 1968

Some photographs have a particular history. Not so much for the photographs themselves but for the way we got to know them.

At the end of my twenties, I discovered Tom Waits, falling in love with his grungy, painful, alcoholic, scratched songs of rock and blues. With his voice drowning in lower and lower pitches, record after record.

I bought the albums of him, with those covers sometimes painted or in photos that almost always showed Tom Waits himself. From that 1978 masterpiece that is “Blue Valentine” or “Nighthawks at the Diner” from 1975, always in decadent poses, in smoky taverns in front of a bottle of whiskey and cigarettes. Then came “Rain Dogs”, from 1985, an album that fascinated me already from the cover. This time it was a photograph but it could very well have been a charcoal drawing, it was so grainy.

A woman who laughs hugging a more absorbed guy, or drunk, given the style of Waits' songs. And I'm not ashamed to say that, for many years, I thought that boy with the long face was the singer, as in all the covers of his records – don't deny me there is a strong resemblance to his face as a young man.

 

Be that as it may, time passes.

I fall in love with Photography and I start reading books and seeing photos, as each of us does. This is how that image comes back powerfully. It wasn't Tom Waits, but an iconic photograph taken by a young Swedish photographer: Anders Petersen.

 

Anders Petersen

 

And now that we're almost at the end of this second series of ten photos, I can't help but choose it from my favorites.

Because Petersen is among those few photographers who have total empathy with the subjects they portray. I am reminded of the names of Moriyama, Mary Ellen Mark, D'Agata, Raghu Rai, in short, those photographers I have already talked about or whom I often mention.

Perhaps because I consider this one of the essential qualities to make me love a photographer, and because I delude myself that I have it too (in my small way).

Then everyone develops it in his own way, following his own sensitivity and vision of the world.

Therefore it is always interesting to read the stories behind the artists and their works.

Petersen, looking at the photographs of him, one would think he had an absurd existence, with who knows what kind of trauma or excesses.

But the photographer, born in Stuttgart in 1944, has spent nearly half of his life teaching and doing workshops around the world.

He studied photography with Christer Strömholm in Sweden from 1966 to 1967, a favorite student of this famous author considered the master of Swedish photography.

His life took a different direction when he moved to study in Hamburg in 1961. In that city, he began to frequent the borderline circles of young rebels, made of rock music, drugs, and alcohol. But also his university studies and his nascent passion for photography, at the age of 21, after having seen the photo of the Montparnasse cemetery under the snow.

He still oscillated between the desire to become a painter, a journalist, or a photographer, then the encounter with the Strömholm photography course directed him towards the destiny we all know: that is, that of having become one of the greatest masters of photography world and source of inspiration for generations of documentary photographers – D'Agata above all, but I keep him for last.

 

I bought a little book about him at first.

Then I gift to myself the monumental anthological book, which not surprisingly has this photograph of Lilly and Rosen from 1968 on the cover.

Leafing through the more than 350 pages of the book you can find crocodiles, prostitutes, twins, people peeing, snowmen, drug addicts, prostitutes, men who do the splits on the subway platform, creepy children, crazy men, and the arcades of Piazza Vittorio in Rome.

Always all in that dense and dirty black and white – more black than white – that he himself produces in the darkroom, until now.

It is not easy to choose a single photo of him, but in this case, there are two reasons: the first is linked to that old love for Tom Waits' album, where the image came before the “knowledge” of it; the second is that that photo is taken from his masterpiece book, the “Café Lehmitz”, from 1978.

 

Anders Petersen. “Kleinchen with dock worker”. “Café Lehmitz”, 1968

Petersen enters it for the first time in 1967, following a woman who accompanies him to this club in the popular neighborhood, a haunt of the strays in the area, prostitutes, drunks, marginalized, workers, transvestites; a large family of which he immediately feels part of it.

After completing his studies in 1968, he moved to live in that bar, bartering a bed to sleep with his looking after the children of the ex-prostitute who runs it.

He stayed there for almost three years, shooting continuously, like a witness to the life of those beings discarded by society who find a reason to be in that place.

“In a certain sense, he photographs both his own life and the state of society, in the sad dances of the local patrons: next to the pinball machine, in the stolen or refused kisses, in the tender and tragic misery of transvestites, in the desperate fragility of those bodies that reveal themselves under the livid lights.”

Christian Caujolle writes about this book, which was first published in '78 and then reprinted in France and Sweden in 1982, immediately becoming a cult book.

 

What is striking is his gaze detached from any possible type of judgment or detachment.

Empathy is total: Petersen becomes the very flesh of that misery, vitality, eroticism, of transvestites, drunks, prostitutes, in their dances as in kisses, tears, or embraces on the benches of the club.

That bar becomes a refuge for the soul, as Urs Stahel poetically writes in his beautiful essay “Laughter, Love, Tears, Silence” on the Swedish photographer:

“A rough place, yet one that felt like home, like a refuge of last resort, battened down against the abyss outside, making the abyss within, the abyss of self, al last almost bearable.”

 

In fact, looking at his photographs, one cannot help but feel the same discomfort of the subjects depicted. There is no moral guideline because in him too there is the same abyss of marginalization, of a vital cry against the absence of meaning of reality that will become the heart of Existentialism in art.

Not surprisingly, after that bar, the next projects of his soul documentaries will be a prison, a hospice and a psychiatric hospital.

All closed, symbolic places, in which he will live there for long periods, to empathize with his subjects – to turn those closed physical places into places of the (dark) soul open towards the lens of his camera.

Always with the utmost respect.

 

“Ander Petersen seeks the margins of society, the places where life is harsh, and in-your-face, without a mask; the places where people living on the edge display their wounds, where outcasts find a home, where the concept of any lifetime vision and all that might provide a buffer against reality have been worn away, if they ever existed at all.”  (Urs Stahel)

 

Anders Petersen. “Café Lehmitz”, 1968

This is truly the feeling you get when looking at his photographs and that makes him inimitable. He shows us without any distance the people who, living on the margins, offer us their wounds.

And he does it – as he says – with both feet inside.

And not only does he take but he also returns, because he is not part of the false and moralistic bourgeoisie that lives on appearances, but on the sincere and visceral family of the marginalized (of the soul).

So in April 1970, with those over 300 photographs taken in the Café Lehmitz he created an exhibition, inside the Café itself, for those costumers photographed by him over the years, who, recognizing themselves in the photos could take them for free. In three days all the photographs vanish, only one remains.

As in the classic concept of the “gift”.

What has been given to us must be returned in some way.

 

“I am not photographing what I see as much as what I feel. It's not about registering something but dealing with the emotion that arises. I want to escape sentimentality and dishonesty. I want the moment to be uncompromising. I have no special method. You have to be lucky, and try to see where the light is and what is about to happen before it happens.”

 

Anders Petersen. “Café Lehmitz”, 1968

This is how he describes his mood when photographing.

Speaking of it in philosophical terms one would say that his Photography is the perfect blend of Existentialism and Phenomenology.

To photograph something by capturing its deep soul, there cannot be distancing, one must be part of it, flesh of the same flesh as the philosopher Merleau-Ponty wrote.

It is not a description but a co-existence.

 

“For me, the photographic instant is also about intimacy with myself. To approach the experience of reality and do more than just describe it. And to try to be present in the experience. At times it's sweet; sometimes I pick up my camera and life jumps into it, like rabbits. Everything is in play.”

 

Then his images, without a doubt, may also not please, blurry, dirty, with absurd cuts, a thousand miles from the formal cleanliness of a Cartier-Bresson, with subjects or scenes often bordering on pornography or on the edge of obscene.

But this is the most important teaching of him, born in that tavern in Hamburg – which will then be brought to the extreme consequences by his “pupil” D'Agata – that is to say that to photograph with sincerity must suspend all moral judgment, one must go down and to bathe in the same darkness.

There is no other form of empathy.

It's necessary to enter it with both feet.

Only in this way can the viewer of the photographs truly enjoy what he observes.

 

Just like the Tom Waits songs.

 

All images are copyrighted © by Anders Petersen or the assignee. Apart from fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism, or review as permitted under the Copyright Act, the use of any image from this site is prohibited unless prior written permission is obtained. All images are used for illustrative purposes only.

 

• “The Photographs I Love” 16 — Pinkhassov 
• "The Photographs I Love" 17—Raghu Rai 

Anders Petersen: “Cafè Lehmitz” (Schirmer-Mosel, 2004)
“Anders Petersen” (Bokforlaget Max Strom, 2013)
“Anders Petersen” (FotoNote\Contrasto, 2004)

 

 

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