Camera workshops Guthe & Thorsch

The entrepreneur Benno B. Thorsch co-founded the Dresden camera factory Guthe & Thorsch in Niedersedlitz in 1919.

Benno Thorsch was forced to give up his company Kamera-Werkstätten Guthe & Thorsch and leave Germany in 1938 due to his Jewish descent.

He took over a business in Detroit in 1938; he later opened the City Camera Exchange studio near Hollywood with his son Bernward.

The forerunner of the ‚Practika‘, the single-lens reflex camera ‚Praktiflex‘, was developed in 1937 at the Guthe & Thorsch camera factory in Dresden by Benno B. Thorsch and the designer Alois Hohesel.