[...] The first consists of the realisation of paintings made from photographs. These paintings either mimic the aspect of the photographic image and its "realistic" effect, or on the contrary, insist on their own materiality, thus drawing the image towards abstraction.

Richter also used amateur photographs, snapshots similar to those found by the millions in family albums. In both cases, the principle for their selection was their ordinary character, their "visual indifference", as referenced by Duchamp with regard to his Readymades.

Painting primarily calls upon the concepts of imitation and representation. These involved the establishment of relations of resemblance and the faculty to build an image with them. Photography differs from it by the chemical recording of the action of light, which makes it a mechanical and physical trace of a local arrangement of things and beings. This difference induces a significant shift in their respective symbolic efficiency. [...] Indeed, any painted image exhibits an indication quality: its surface and irregularities are the material marks of the artist's gestures. As such a painting represents the accumulation of the singular activities and events which produced it. But painting does not physically emanate from that which it represents, whereas a photograph is the physical index of the local reality which affected it. As a result, a photograph holds no particular style, at least in a pictorial sense.

Oil painting, which for centuries was considered as the archetypal means of iconic imitation, is now reduced to imitating that which has destroyed its intended purpose, namely the photographic print. In mimicking the iconic aspect of the photographic image, painting seems to be making every effort to achieve an objectivity which remains nonetheless beyond its reach. But Richter is no less ironic with respect to photography. His use of the traditional means of pictorial imitation to recreate the visual aspect of a photographic print voids the resulting image of its indical character, therefore depriving its unique right to supplant painting as the most objective recording of reality.

The blurring technique prevents any particular detail from becoming dominant over another, thus reaffirming their overall adherence to the flat-painted surface. This affirmation characterises the image all the more as a photographic object; an objective presence in reverse to its ability to resemble and document.

If we can see more in a blurred landscape than in a landscape painted "with exactitude", it is because the viewer then necessarily ceases to itemize objects, in order to ask about what he/she sees and what he/she wants to see.

A shock resulting not so much from what the painting depicts, as from what it lacks, as well as what should be there in order for us to receive from it a feeling or "consolation and pleasure". ("not the least fishing-boat nor the least ship, not even a sea-creature, nor, in the sand, a blade of grass.") Friedrich's painting thus confronts the viewers with both the presented image, and the images whose absence haunts their gaze.

[...] One of these means takes on specific relevance with regard to Richter's remarks: the invention of mist-filled landscapes, or images of fog.

When a landscape is covered in mist, it appears bigger, more sublime, it reinforces the strength of the imagination and excites the expectation, exactly like a veiled woman. The eye and fantasy feel more attracted by nebulous distance than by that which is close and distinct in front of us.

It means opening the gaze to the anticipation of the sublime through the powers of the imagination and the expectations of desire.