Ella

Photography was central to Richter's practice from its earliest phase: he sourced images for his Photo Paintings from newspapers, magazines and personal albums, and maintained the Atlas – an ongoing accumulation of photographic material begun in 1962 – as a parallel work running across his entire career. Ella belongs to a particular subset of that engagement: the intimate domestic photograph, which Richter periodically elevated to the status of edition print.

The image is taken from above and slightly behind. Ella's face is bowed, eyes cast downward, in a moment of private attention. The light falls from the left, overexposing the pink of her shirt and drawing the upper portion of the image towards white. Small gold stud earrings are just visible at her ears. The red fabric of the background – a cushion or sofa, barely resolved – provides a warm field behind her. There is no artifice of composition: the photograph was taken in the circumstances in which it occurred.

This informality is itself a considered position. Richter's use of family photographs – his children, his wife Sabine, domestic interiors – returns throughout his career to photography's function as an imperfect preservation technology, and to the question of what it means to make an image of someone close to you. Ella sits within that inquiry, rendered as a fine art print and circulated as an edition, while retaining the visual register of the private album.