Photographer Anders Petersen was casually photographing at Café Lehmitz on Hamburg's Reeperbahn when a patron grabbed his camera and began taking their own pictures. Petersen seized the opportunity to photograph his new friend—and the rest of the bar's unusual customers.
The resulting photo series is considered one of the greatest photobooks of all time. It celebrates the gritty counterculture of late-1960s Hamburg and established Petersen as an iconic photographer. The candid portraits remain as striking and authentic today as when first published in 1978.
Tom Waits, who featured one photo from the series on the cover of his 1985 album 'Rain Dogs,' contributes a foreword to Prestel’s new edition praising Petersen's "stunning analog photography and its elegiac collective portrait of the fringes of society."
