Quotes by
Gerhard Richter

Belief is something with many sides to it. Believing in pictures is like believing in God— or believing in pictures in a practical sense, at a time when painting is rather out of favor…. We're always creating pictures; take fashion, for example. We put something on because we believe in it, and we thereby offer a picture of ourselves that tells other people who we are and what we're like. The same happens in other ways— we're always creating pictures for other people to understand if they can.

The photograph is the most perfect picture. It does not change; it is absolute, and therefore autonomous, unconditional, devoid of style.

I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)

I do not mean to attack anything at all. The most seemingly banal pictures are on the contrary the richest... A snapshot, when one conforms to it, becomes an extremely powerful factor... the family photo, with everyone well portrayed in the center of the image, is literally overflowing with life.

I have taken an interest in photography because it illustrates reality so well.

To make a photograph is already the first artificial act.

Throwaway snapshots come closest to achieving the state of pure picture.

I do not mistrust reality, of which I know next to nothing, but I am suspicious regarding the image of reality which our senses convey to us, and which is incomplete and limited. Our eyes have developed such as to survive. It is merely coincidence that we can see stars with them, as well.

Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking. Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented.

Already now I am searching for the most boring and irrelevant photo material that I can find. And I would like to get to the point soon where this determined irrelevance could be retained, in favor of something that would be covered up otherwise by artifice.

What counts isn’t being able to do a thing, it’s seeing what it is. Seeing is the decisive act, and ultimately it places the maker and the viewer on the same level.

Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred percent picture. And painting always has reality...

When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know what I am doing... The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.

To be filled with an idea is the greatest thing that can happen to me. Otherwise one is just empty.

All photographs are far more important than any painting.

The photograph is the only picture that can truly convey information, even if it is technically faulty and the object can barely be identified. A painting of a murder is of no interest whatever; but a photograph of a murder fascinates everyone.

I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic thing that anyone could do.

Every time we describe an event, add up a column of figures, or take a photograph of a tree, we create a model; without models we would know nothing about reality and would be like animals.

[Photographs] being painted no longer tell of a specific situation, and the representation becomes absurd.