User:NewDepot/Evelyn Richter

Evelyn Richter (born January 31, 1930) is a German photographer, known primarily for social documentary photography work in East Germany. She is notable for her black and white photography documenting working class life, which often showed influences of Dadaism and Futurism.

In 1992, she was awarded the Culture Award from the German Society for Photography, and in 2006 was awarded the Art Prize of the State Capital of Dresden.

Richter was born in Bautzen in 1930.

After completing a photographic apprenticeship in Dresden with Franz Fiedler and Pan Walther from 1948 to 1951, Richter worked as a laboratory assistant at the Vereinigte Kaufstätten Dresden and as a photographer at the TU Dresden. In 1953, she enrolled at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig (HGB) to study Fotografik (graphic photography) with Johannes Widmann, professor of the Institute of Photography.

In 1955, she was removed as a student for her "independent interests and pictorial ideas which are foreign to the demands of a realistic socialist art." She began work as a freelance photographer, working for such clients as the Leipzig Trade Fair and Sibylle magazine, while simultaneously building a body of work documenting changing life and work in East Germany. Her photographs frequently explored the relationship between industrial machinery and the human, often female, operators.

The Evelyn Richter Archive, with over 730 of her photographs, has been held at the Museum der bildenden Künste (Museum of Fine Arts) in Leipzig since 2009.

ISBN 978-3-96098-527-3