Richard Peter

Richard Peter (* 10. May 1895 in Klein Jenkwitz; † 3. October 1977 in Dresden) was a German press photographer and photojournalist. He is best known for his photographs of Dresden just after the end of World War II.

For the Canadian basketball player, see Richard Peter (Paralympian).
Selfportrait of Richard Peter

Richard Peter was born and raised in Klein Jenkwitz, Silesia, working as a smith and a miner while dabbling in photography. He was drafted into the German army in 1914 to serve in World War I. After the war he settled in Halle and later in Dresden. He joined the labor movement and the Communist Party of Germany. During the 1920s and early 1930s he published his photographs in various left-wing publications. Because of this he was promptly barred from working as a press photographer when the Nazi Party rose to power in 1933. During the Third Reich he worked in advertising, before being drafted again to serve in World War II.

Peter returned to Dresden in September 1945 to find the city destroyed after the bombing of Dresden in February 1945. His personal archive and equipment had been completely destroyed in the raids. Starting over with borrowed equipment, he began to document the damage to the city and the beginnings of its reconstruction. His photographs were published in 1949 in a volume called Dresden, eine Kamera klagt an ("Dresden, a photographic accusation", ISBN 3-930195-03-8).

In 1949 Peter was expelled from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany, the successor of the Communist Party, when he investigated corrupt party officials. He continued to work as a freelance art photographer in Dresden until his death in 1977, and eventually won some international recognition for his work. Peter's more than 5,000 negatives and prints were acquired by the Saxon State Library in 1983.

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    gollark: Some of them are just weird for reasons other than that, though.
    gollark: 4703 somehow *does things* just because the law says it can, even though the law is just a human concept and only affects what humans do.
    gollark: Really, one of the main things which makes (some) SCPs weird is that they take convenient abstractions/concepts and turn them into immutable physical laws, while our real universe just runs on... well, physics. 173 is affected by line of sight, even though this is just a thing humans do to reason about... looking at things. 005 is just a magic item which unlocks things, 048 is just a label we assign to things which somehow affects them.
    gollark: Alternatively, the machine breaks, if it prefers simple changes - so I guess make it STUPIDLY redundant.
    gollark: * didn't happen
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