The artist of the month:
No, she was not a dissident. She was never persecuted, never knew the prisons of the GDR, she did not have to go into exile like so many other artists. But her photos, all in black and white in the tradition of the socially critical photography of the Western school, show the everyday life of state socialism in a haunting and melancholy way, and not the smiling face of progress that was demanded by official art ideology. She described herself as a partisan...
As the daughter of an upper middle-class family, she was initially not allowed to "study" in the "workers' and peasants' state". She completed an apprenticeship as a photographer with the portrait painter Pan Walther. However, she was later accepted to study at the Academy of Visual Arts (HGB), the only university in the GDR with a chair in photography.
However, she was dismissed after two years: Her ironic photographic portraits of fellow students were too defeatist for the management and did not conform to the system. Many years later, in 1980, after the stabilisation of the GDR system at the end of the Honecker era, she was given a professorship at the university that had dismissed her in 1956. In the many years before that, she had survived by accepting commissions for system-loyal magazines and brochures. Advertisements and photographed concerts - her impressive series of photos of musicians such as David Oïstrakh are famous today.
Her own visual language - disturbing, indigestible, anarchic, melancholic - was created in Moscow in 1957.
1957 in Moscow. Her medium format camera had broken down and she began to photograph with a LEICA 35mm camera, which she always carried with her until the end of her life: "That was an incisive experience for me, you could almost say mind-blowing" (Evelyn Richter). Thanks to this camera, she was able to get closer to people and work more spontaneously and flexibly. However, she always resisted being a photographer of the moment. Rather, she sought the "moment of concentration" in the sense of Cartier-Bresson's decisive moment. Many of her photos took her weeks or even months to complete.
People, individuals against the backdrop of this "socialist" reality are the actual and only motif of her work. People at joyful demonstrations in Moscow, Berlin or Prague. People sitting in trams, trains and buses, reading, dreaming and gazing into the emptiness before them. Lost individuals against the backdrop of the prefabricated buildings typical of the GDR or in the huge, empty squares of the eastern capitals. Women working in front of, in and on their huge old machines, cranes, metal spinning machines, hydraulic newspaper presses and so on. The reality of equal rights for women in the GDR was perhaps her most important theme. Richter shows us women concentrating on their complex work processes, always serious, disillusioned, often melancholic. Exhausted women, but not workers who were exploited or physically scarred by hard labour.
All of her intimate and empathetic photographs develop a real attraction for the viewer. Evelyn Richter took the majority of her photos, as she herself says, "for the box", a huge collection of cardboard boxes in which she systematically stored her works. She was barely able to publish a single photo, and it was not until 1979 that she had her first solo exhibition.
A year before her death in Dresden in 2021, a major exhibition was dedicated to her work, which is still largely unknown in the West. She was the first winner of the Bernd and Hilla Becher Prize.
The largest exhibition of her work with many photos from her "box" took place in Düsseldorf in 2022 - 2023. The fantastic and extensive catalogue shows the full range of her work and testifies - perhaps precisely because of the time shift to this vanished world - to the universality and deep humanity of her work. We were very touched and would like to encourage you to immerse yourself in Evelyn Richter's world of images.
Authors: Peter Winz & Joseph Kastersztein