Evelyn Richter’s Street Photography Reveals the Reality of Life in East Germany

 

For photographer Evelyn Richter (1930–2021) East Germany was not computers being towed by the bikini-clad
proletariat, Western holidaymakers, badly disguised secret police and being on the wrong side of the Berlin Wall. A self-described “documentarian and historian”, Richter avoided the parades and the politics to capture day-to-day life in East Germany, chronicling the social conditions of the working classes, and in particular, the working lives of women, in austere places and dreary cityscapes in a decaying truth regime. Her pictures how us an unvarnished vision of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), a unique socialist material culture that lasted for 40 years in which, as the title of one photography book on the country put it,  ‘nichts ist so einfach wie es scheint’ (nothing was as it seems).

 

 

Living and teaching in Berlin and Leipzig and Berlin, and a member of the East German Culture Association’s Central Commission for Photography (ZKF), Richter spent time focusing on four friends: Ursula Arnold, Christa Sammler, Eva Wagner-Zimmerman and Richter. The pictures she included an unrealised photobook ‘Women in the GDR’.

Rarely if ever on the streets without a camera, Richter surreptitiously took photographs of fellow passengers and exhausted workers in Dresden, Berlin, Leipzig and Lusatia, often in the thoughtful act of reading.

 

 

Curator Heniner Müller once remarked on the ‘waiting-room mentality’ of East Germans, who are “in a constant state of waiting, as in a waiting room. Like a new platform announcement. The train will arrive at 6:15 and depart at 6:20, but the 6:15 never came.”

 

 

At the time of her death in 2021, a huge archive – containing hundreds of boxes – was left behind, revealing the extent of her practice. Her desire to document was insatiable – and is argubly one of the best records we have of post-war life in East Germany.

Evelyn Richter: A Photographer’s Life was on show at MdbK in Leipzig in 2023. The accompanying monograph was published by Spector Books.