Reuter, Walter

His first camera was a Contessa Nettel 6x9”. In the late 1920s, he documented the misery of proletarian families in the suburbs of Berlin. When he had fifteen photos, he took them to the leftist magazine AIZ (Arbeiter-Illustrierte Zeitung). They paid him handsomely for his report, and with that money, he bought better photographic equipment. In 1930, persecuted by the Nazis after publishing his photographs of demonstrations against the National Socialist Party, he left Germany, arriving in Spain after traveling through Switzerland and France in May 1933. The Second Republic was governing in Madrid. He and his family made a living singing on the terraces of Málaga. During this period, he also met and photographed numerous wealthy families on the southern coast and befriended intellectuals such as the Granadian poet Federico García Lorca, with whom he worked on a photographic documentary project about "The House of Bernarda Alba."

After the coup d'état in 1936, the photographer decided to enlist in the Andalusian militia under the orders of the Unified Socialist Youth. He also fought with his camera: his main task was to photograph those affected by fascism in the rear, especially children. He sent his snapshots to the Black Star photo agency in New York and London. He also participated in filmed propaganda documentaries about the Workers' Institute of Valencia and the Colonies of children protected by the Second Spanish Republic, who were suffering the consequences of fascism.

In 1942, he fled again and boarded a Portuguese ship bound for the Mexican port of Veracruz. He lived for a year in Puebla, where he worked with a borrowed camera. Later, the family moved to Mexico City, where the photographer contacted friends from his time in Spain. Since they were film directors, they encouraged him to start working as a cameraman and producer. He made several successful documentaries, such as "History of a River, Land of Chicle," where he narrated the life of the chicleros who collected sap from the sapodilla tree in the heart of the Chiapas jungle. He also worked for ten years for the weekly program "Clasa y Cine Verdad." But later, he returned to photography for financial reasons and worked as a highly demanded reporter for European magazines.

It is estimated that Reuter took over 35,000 photographs (his complete archive, maintained and organized by his daughter Hely, contains about 120,000 negatives) of more than 20 Mexican indigenous peoples. He worked for the magazines "Nosotros," "Hoy," "Siempre," and "Mañana de México."