Anders Petersen was born in 1944 in Stockholm, Sweden. In 1961, aged 17, he went to live in Hamburg to learn German and to try to write and paint. Five years later he met the man who would become a mentor, close friend and his biggest influence, Swedish photographer Christer Strömholm. Inspired by one of Christer’s photographs, which he saw in a magazine he picked up in a barber shop, Anders began his photographic education, enroling at Strömholm’s school of photography in Stockholm.

In 1967 Anders returned to Hamburg where he began photographing in a bar called Café Lehmitz. Over a three year period, he produced one of his most well known and celebrated bodies of work. In 1970 he had his first solo exhibition in the bar with 350 photographs nailed to the walls and the work was later published as a  ...