Gerhard Richter is a leading figure in German post-war painting. Richter is celebrated in part for his conceptual utilization of found photographs (both personal records and within mainstream media) that he transforms through painting to raise questions about the authority, autonomy, and discernibility of all images. Since the early 1960s, Richter has built a massive archive of photographs, newspaper cuttings, and sketches assembled under the title of Atlas, the first few pages of which are dedicated mostly to the personal documents of individuals that one might find in family photo albums. In post-war divided Germany, an entire generation had begun to question what they knew to be normal, as family members, neighbors, teachers, and other members of the community often held direct roles in the National Socialist party during the Second World War. What appear to be innocent images cannot be removed from their context. Richter was one of the few artists to confront this period directly, often painting portraits of his family members, including his Uncle Rudi (1965) wearing a Wehrmacht uniform. 

Richter’s painting Alfons Strawalski (1966), painted the following year, depicts in grisaille a man with outstretched hands and shielded eyes, his features blurred beyond recognition. The un-cropped source photograph is found in Atlas and includes a second male figure within a domestic setting. Richter confirmed that the title given to the painting was of his own making, and that the original format included the second figure.[1] These changes exist as obstacles to identifying the subjects in Richter’s everyday portraits taken during a period under authoritarian regime, shortly after historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt coined the term, “the banality of evil.”