Born in Wausau, Wisconsin, on February 8, 1873, Robert F. Laatsch was the third son of Prussian immigrants; his father, Frederich Laatsch, was a common laborer. As a young man, Robert Laatsch was also a laborer; he was described in the 1900 U.S. census as a twenty-seven-year-old laborer in a door factory. By that time he had also been married to the former Emma A. Walters for two years and had a one-year-old son, Harold. It is unknown why or how Laatsch took up a camera, but in 1905 he was suddenly listed as a photographer in the Wisconsin state census. By 1910, however, he had returned to factory work and, later, he was amployed as a gas maker as a steel plant. Laatsch died at age fifty-two in Saint Louis, Minnesota, on May 27, 1925, apparently never returning to the practice of photography.
