Peter Geller was born in 1945 in Hamburg/ Germany. In his teen years, while going to boarding school, he was able to make some extra money with his first camera shooting portraits of young girls in the woods and then printing the negatives at night. Since he had no strobe lighting he got the idea to use mirrors to reflect the light onto his subjects. After high school, with law school calling him to become a famous lawyer, he took his photo skills with him as a way to make some extra money. His first part time job was a stringer for the Hamburger Newspaper ABENDBLATT and then STERN magazine as a press photographer. Not surprisingly he found that he was very good at making pictures, and this worked out very well economically as he made much more money than the photographers which were employed by the papers. Peter Geller's big break came when he was assigned to cover the breaking story of a bank robbery in the south of Germany (500 miles away from his native Hamburg). The shots he took where published by all the major magazines in every country in the world. For these amazing shots Peter received the greatest award in press photography available for 1971, the WORLD PRESS PHOTO AWARD. This as they say was the turning point for Peter and his new career.
“WORLD PRESS PHOTO” contest winners meet in Amsterdam