To Work For A Revolution And Fail. Gerhard Richter's October 1977 Paintings.

This paper tries to explore the relationship of photography, painting and cultural memory by discussing the instalation called October 1977 by the German artist Gerhard Richter. Belonging into the category of Richter's famous photo-paintings, the chosen series shows an important and crucial moment in the history of post-war West Germany. I will try to discuss the paintings under three different aspects, trying to shed some light on why out of all of Richter's photo-paintings they can claim a special status.The first chapter of the paper will deal with two of the most known and important writings about photography, namely that of Susan Sontag and Roland Barthes. Those theories will give us the possibility to shed some light on the primary sources Richter used for his paintings. This discussion will also touch on the function photography plays in society.In the second chapter I will introduce the painter Gerhard Richter and one of his painting specialities:the so-called photo-paintings, paintings Richter did after original (press-)photographs. The photographs he found earlier were brought together to form the big corpus of base material that he used for his paintings, which he called the Atlas and which is, in short, a collection of hundreds of photographs. In the same chapter I will also touch upon the relationship of photography and painting, as well as on some of Richter's thoughts and opinions about art in general.Following the general introduction about Richter and his work, I chose some of the October 1977 paintings to discuss them in depth, using Sontag's and Barthes' theories as starting points. The aim of this part is to show how photography, instead of consting a threat to painting, can merge fruitfully with it and bring about interesting and much discussed pieces of art. I will also try to discuss the changing position of the sujets of the photographs that occurs when Richter puts them on canvas. The third part of the paper will, then, discuss social implications of photography and using an example I want to show that Richter, by using well known photographs for his paintings (which, by the way, are also heavily politically loaded), takes pieces of German cultural memory and transforms them into simple statements concerning the life and death of revolutionaries/terrorists. This action, in my argumentation, brings the topics of these paintings back to one of the most basic topics that was made use of by artists since the very beginning:the question concerning life and death.The last part, finally, will deal with some thoughts about political icons, as press photographs easily can be transformed into icons that afterwards will form part of the cultural memory of states, groups in society, or that will stand for special movements and ideologies. It is nothing new that such well known and famous icons are used by artists (just think of Andy Warhol, for example); but the fact that Richter used what might be called 'negative icons' for his paintings is a question that should be discussed in this final chapter.