Anders Petersen used a Leica. He used it close. Very close.
This is not incidental to the work. The photographs in Cafe Lehmitz – made between 1967 and 1970 in a Hamburg bar frequented by prostitutes, drifters, and alcoholics – have a physical intimacy that is inseparable from the equipment and the method. You cannot make those photographs from across the room. You cannot make them with a long lens. You have to be there, in the person’s face, and the camera has to be small enough that being there is possible.
Leica as a Tool for Closeness
Leica is a small, quiet, rangefinder camera. It does not look like a serious camera to people who do not know cameras. It does not sound like one either — the shutter is almost silent. These two properties made it useful to Petersen in exactly the way a large, loud SLR would not have been.
In Cafe Lehmitz, Petersen spent years as a regular before he started photographing seriously. By the time the camera was out, he was not a stranger. The Leica helped maintain that. A camera that draws attention to itself would have broken the atmosphere. The Leica did not draw attention to itself.
This is a specific argument for a specific piece of equipment in a specific context. The lesson is not that everyone should use a Leica. The lesson is that the choice of equipment either supports or undermines what you are trying to do, and Petersen understood exactly which side of that line his camera sat on.
Fast Film in Low Light
Cafe Lehmitz was lit the way bars are lit – poorly. Tungsten bulbs, not many of them, casting warm orange light into a space that was mostly shadow. Petersen shot fast black and white film and pushed it. The results are grainy, high contrast, with blown highlights where the light sources appear directly and deep shadow everywhere else.
This is not a failure of technical execution. It is the correct technical response to the conditions. Fast film pushed hard gives you grain, and grain in this context does something that clean, sharp, finely resolved photography would not. It makes the photographs feel urgent. It makes them feel like they were made in conditions that were not designed for photography, which is exactly what they were.
The film choice and the processing choice were not aesthetic decisions made in isolation. They were practical responses to available light that happened to produce exactly the right aesthetic.
Black and White as an Ethical Choice
Petersen has spoken about shooting black and white as a deliberate choice rather than a default. Colour, he has suggested, can seduce. It can make a difficult subject beautiful in a way that lets the viewer off the hook – the beauty of the colour becomes the subject rather than the person in the frame.
Black and white removes that option. The viewer has nowhere to go except the face, the hands, the body, the relationship between the people in the frame. In Cafe Lehmitz, where the subject matter was people living difficult lives in a warm and unbeautiful bar, this mattered.
This is not a universal argument for black and white. It is a specific argument for why black and white was right for this project, made by someone who had thought carefully about what he was doing and why.
Working in Available Light Only
Petersen does not use flash. The reasons are practical and ethical in equal measure. A flash in a bar changes the atmosphere of the bar. It announces the photographer. It turns the subject into a subject rather than a person who happens to be being photographed.
Available light photography in low conditions requires a different relationship with technical imperfection. You will not get clean, sharp, well-exposed photographs. You will get photographs that look like the place actually looked, made by someone who was actually there, with a camera that was actually present rather than announcing itself.
The imperfection is the record of presence.
Three Questions Worth Asking Before You Go Out
Does your equipment support what you are trying to do or undermine it? A large camera in an intimate setting is not neutral. It changes what is possible. Petersen’s equipment choices were precise responses to his subject matter. What does your subject matter require?
Are you using the right film for the available light, or are you using the film you prefer? Fast film in low light is not a compromise. It is the correct choice. Petersen pushed Tri-X in tungsten light and got exactly what the situation needed.
What does colour add to your subject, and what does it take away? Petersen made the argument that for his subject, colour would have been a distraction. It is worth asking the same question about whatever you are photographing.
Using BYgo for Petersen Conditions
Petersen worked indoors in available light, which puts him outside the scope of what BYgo can plan for directly. But the conditions that produce his aesthetic – low light, high contrast, the particular quality of artificial illumination in an enclosed space – have an outdoor equivalent.
BYgo will tell you when the light outside is doing something similar: late evening, mixed artificial and natural light, the transition between dusk and full dark. If you are photographing people in the street rather than in a bar, this is Petersen’s window. The light is insufficient, the contrast is high, and fast film is the correct response.
Further Reading
Cafe Lehmitz (1978), reissued by Schirmer/Mosel, is the essential text. Close Distance (2001) extends the practice across four decades of work. Both repay close looking.
Part of the How They Saw It series — exploring how the photographers in BYgo’s shooting briefs thought about light, time, place, and conditions. Next: Nan Goldin on Light.