©Peter Sekaer

Peter Sekaer was born in Copenhagen, Denmark in 1901 and immigrated to New York at age seventeen. After a short stay in Canada, Sekaer returned to New York, where he started a graphics business. He studied painting at the Art Students League in 1929 where he met the artist Ben Shahn. In 1934 Sekaer studied photography with Berenice Abbott at the New School for Social Research and began assisting Walker Evans, whom he met through Shahn, in 1935. Sekaer accompanied Evans on a trip to the New Orleans and other parts of the Southern United States in 1936 while Evans was employed as a photographer for the Resettlement Administration. Sekaer was hired as principal photographer for the Rural Electrification Administration in 1936 and was loaned by the agency to work for the United States Housing Authority (USHA) in 1938. After brief stints with the FSA, OWI and American Red Cross, Sekaer left Government service in 1944 and worked as a commercial photographer until his untimely death in 1950. Recent exhibitions of his work in Denmark and at the Addison Gallery of American Art in Andover, have brought the work of this great documentary photographer back into the public eye.