Melancholy is burned into every photograph.

But what Evelyn Richter recorded with her pictures all her life is hard to beat in terms of sadness.

She was by no means traveling in slum areas, but documented what the establishment of a showcase project was supposed to be: the workers 'and peasants' state.

With her, however, it always seems to have gone downhill.

Freddy Langer

Editor in the features section, responsible for the "Reiseblatt".

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If you leaf through her work, you initially encounter skeptical looks.

That was at the beginning of the 1950s, after she had started an apprenticeship in Pan Walther's studio in Dresden and continued her studies at the Leipzig University of Graphics and Book Art.

However, the academy already regarded these portraits of some artists and many of their fellow students as a sign of exaggerated discouragement - and promptly gave her the expulsion.

However, this only spurred them on completely to take pictures against the official image propaganda of the GDR.

Far from the utopias of a new, better world order, she worked on a catalog of images of existentialism.

And presented an everyday life in which despair, sadness and shabbiness were at home.

Unit views

Regardless of whether she devoted herself to passengers in the tram or workers in the factories, visitors to art exhibitions or pensioners in her sparsely furnished apartments, Evelyn Richter always found examples of a bland unified view: a stare into the void, which even retreats into one's own inwardness for a long time is already denied. It therefore seems surprising, but it was only consistent, that the authors of the educational book “Development Wonder Man” at the end of the 1970s invited them of all people to provide the illustrations for this volume in the area of ​​tension between politics and education. After all, through the detour of her photographs, the authoritarian crèche education plans, which stretched to the limits of dressage, were to be undermined and the promotion of individuality was to be emphasized.

Evelyn Richter may have worked most closely among the photographers of the GDR in the sense of a social documentary, humanistically committed manner - a decision that can be traced back to the large, successful exhibition “The Family of Man”, which Edward Steichen called after the end of the war Gesture of reconciliation for the Museum of Modern Art and which on her world tour in 1955 also stopped in West Berlin, where Evelyn Richter visited her. And it is based on the worldview of her mentor, the photographer Arno Fischer, who helped her back to work in the second half of the 1950s - so far,that from 1981 on she was even able to teach at the College of Graphics and Book Art for almost ten years and thus helped shape the image perception of an entire generation of East German photographers.

Symbols

Evelyn Richter had a clear idea of ​​the mission of photography.

A good picture, she explained, must be a symbol, must contain the power of experience, condense emotions and convey content.

Of course, something else also resonates in her pictures: defiance.

Because the importance of honesty towards the world, which can lead to the sharpest criticism, remains unmentioned in their demand.

It was not easy in the system of the GDR, for her work she compared herself to a partisan.

For years she therefore worked freelance and, as she herself put it, “for the box”.

In the end, however, it received the recognition it deserved when the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung bought a bundle of 730 of its prints for the Leipzig Museum of Fine Arts in 2009 - as a history book made up of pictures that dealt with the contradictions of a state in all sharpness.

Evelyn Richter died last Sunday at the age of ninety-one.