Photography In-the-Round: Gerhard Richter’s “48 Portraits”, 1972 and 1998

Abstract

This paper looks at the different photographic appearances of Gerhard Richter’s work “48 Portraits” — a group of 48 individual paintings of famed men, based on photographic portraits sourced from encyclopaedias. First devised for the German Pavilion of the 1972 Venice Biennale, his “48 Portraits” have since seen a range of site-specific arrangements. After a first photographic set in 1972, Richter finally authorized a photographic edition of the paintings in 1998, which resulted in increasingly different installations that now divert more and more from the original hanging instructions. This paper considers examples of these installations (displayed in long single rows or montaged in grids) as well as the four versions of the piece (as paintings of photographs, as photographs of painted photographs with and without borders, and as part of “Atlas”), in order to discuss the variable nature of what is considered to be a piece of work, its non-biographical treatment of archival sources, its transformation through media, questions of authorship, spectatorship and documentation as well as display strategies of inverting and reverting methods of theatre “in-the-round”.