Ute Mahler Shows Us The Real East Germany

“I wanted to see what was hiding behind the prescribed official false optimism. I was looking for the truth in the inner realm of people’s lives.”

– Ute Mahler, photographs of communist East Germany

 

 

Between 1972 and 1988, Ute Mahler repeatedly turned her camera on the people around her. “I wanted to find out how they organized their lives together,” she says. The result is a series of photographs of everyday life in East Germany. “In 1988, I felt this work had come to an end,” she says. “I thought I had understood something. That may have been due to the time of political upheaval, but I’m not sure.”

 

In a brief afterword to her book Zusammenleben (German for “living together”), Mahler tells us: “I was spurred on by the question of how familiar people were with each other, as well as how alien they could become. Today, I think I probably wanted to take pictures where you could see love.”

 

“I was still a student in Leipzig when I began to photograph groups of people. To begin with, they were just random. But they all raised the same question: how do people interact together?… I was 20 or so years old. I wanted answers. I wanted to see what was hiding behind the prescrlibed official false optimism. I was looking for the truth in the inner realm of people’s lives… But I took them for myself. I wasn’t looking for anything sensational, I wanted to find something universal, extending from tenuous relationships, family and friendship, depicting happiness, impermanence, despair, resignation and/or proximity”

– Ute Mahler

 

Ute Mahler was born in 1949 in Bad Berka, Thuringia. She studied at the School for Graphic and Book Arts in Leipzig and has been a professor at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg since 2000. She lives in Hamburg and Lehnitz, near Berlin

In 1977, Mahler began taking commissions from women’s fashion magazine Sibylle. She also started taking portraits mainly to illustrate the record sleeves of East German rock groups

Mahler started her project Zusammenleben to move away from set photography. She said: “I carried out this work freely, at liberty; it was very personal in nature and not commissioned.”

 

In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mahler founded the photography agency Ostkreuz. She said: ‘I took my last photo in 1988. I felt that I had found enough answers to my questions. Maybe it was linked to the political upheaval at the time but I’m not sure.”

 

Zusammenleben at La Maison De L’Image Documentaire in Sète, France. All photographs: Ute Mahler/Ostkreuz – Agentur der Fotografen GmbH.