In 1964, the editors of Quick, the groundbreaking German photo news-magazine, published the work of a dozen of its leading contributors. Each of the photo journalists included in the volume, Report Der Reporter, were invited to discuss their art in an accompanying essay. Among the photographers highlighted was Peter Bock-Schroeder (1913-2001), who vividly chronicled life on the far-flung fringes of the post war world in his journeys as a foreign correspondent for Stern and Revue magazines, as well as Quick. Bock-Schroeder’s wide-ranging travels took him from the palace of the exiled German Kaiser Wilhelm II in Doorn, Netherlands, to remote and impoverised villages of native peoples in the jungles of Peru and the Alaskan tundra. Bock-Schroeder’s camera captured some of the last moments in the disappearing lives of salmon fishermen in Oregon, the indigenous peoples of Alaska, Bolivia and Peru and the displaced peasants of Soviet Russia. In regions as distant from one another as the war-ravaged cities of his own Germany, the remote mining towns of Bolivia and the devastated former battleground at Stalingrad. Bock-Schroeder chronicled worlds in collision. The scenes he framed in his camera lens were landscapes, he wrote. But they were not the pretty pictures of “willows by the river or beeches in the fog” that he was after, but rather the landscapes of a world violently “disturbed” by man.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Steve Dougherty