Richard Peter

Richard Peter was born and raised in Klein Jenkwitz, Silesia, where as a teenager he worked as a smith and a miner while dabbling in photography.

He joined the labor movement and the Communist Party of Germany, and during the 1920s and early 1930s his photographs were published 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.

Starting over with borrowed equipment, he began to document the damage to the city and the beginnings of its reconstruction.

Dresden was in the Soviet occupation zone, and Peter's later life was in the new communist East Germany.