Born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in1901, Peter Sekaer immigrated to the United States in 1918. Once he reached New York, he started a successful printing business. He produced posters, advertisements and window displays. In 1929, he enrolled in the Art Students League to study painting. By 1934, he left painting and began working as a photographer. He secured several contracts for various governmental agencies that were created as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal Program. In 1945, Sekaer started his own commercial photography business, shooting advertisements and human-interest stories for magazines.
Currently, Signs of Life, an exhibition of his work, is on view at the High Museum. This exhibition is the first in-depth presentation of Sekaer’s vivid photographic record of America during the Depression—an era during which he spent much of his time traveling across the country on freight trains. In order to capture and depict a genuine reflection of the average American person’s life during such harsh times, he worked very closely with American families, photographing them in their homes and at work. In some cases, he would attach notes to his photographs documenting the names and ages of all members in a family along with their hourly wages and occupations. As an artist and anthropologist, he was concerned with documenting the artifacts of American culture. Notably, his photographs remained objective while still committed to the subjects' concerns.
His photographs are represented in collections of major museums in the United States and Denmark. However, with more than seventy rare vintage prints by Sakaer—many of which have never been on public view—the High Museum holds the largest collection of his works in all of American museums.
Signs of Life: Photographs by Peter Sekaer will be on view at the High until Janury 9th, 2011.
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