In April 2012, Evelyn Richter (1930 Bautzen – 2021 Dresden) travelled to Moscow for the last time to document the Orthodox Easter celebration in the Pafnuty Monastery in Borovsk. Thus a long-held wish of hers came true. After her first trip to Moscow in 1957, the photographer was overwhelmed by the people in Moscow’s museums and exhibitions. The intensity with which the visitors devoted themselves to the artworks from the different eras impressed and touched her deeply. While she was not able to take photographs in the churches where she sought to encounter people during services or prayers, she saw people in museums in front of icons and religious images. Richter captured their devotional encounters with the altarpieces, which had become museum exhibits in glass display cases. These photographs were the impetus for her long-term project of the so-called museum visitors.
In 2012, five decades later, Evelyn Richter was able to move freely in the new and restored churches and monasteries of the early modern era and attend an Easter service with official authorization. Herself having grown up in a Protestant environment, she was fascinated by the deep and intensely lived religiousness. Richter deliberately photographed in colour instead of black and white. She wanted to capture the exuberant, almost painterly variety of colours of the (gilded) icons, the magnificent priestly robes and the simple clothing of the faithful. From the extensive film material, she created a group of works entitled Licht im Dunkel, one of her last works. The Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung was able to purchase this work for the Evelyn Richter Archive of the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung at the Museum der bildenden Künste Leipzig. While the singular photograph from Borovsk from 1957 was shown without context in the exhibition “Evelyn Richter. A Photographer's Life” in 2023/24 at the MdbK, now works from over fifty years of creative production are being brought together.
An exhibition of the Evelyn Richter Archive of the Ostdeutsche Sparkassenstiftung in the MdbK
