UTE MAHLER, WERNER MAHLER

When Ute and Werner Mahler began working on their first joint project, they had already been a couple for more than forty years and each could look back on a distinguished photographic career—both in the German Democratic Republic, where they grew up, and in the period following the German reunification. Both had studied photography in Leipzig and worked as freelance photographers, undertaking commissions as well as pursuing their own subjects.

In 1990, together with five other leading photographers from the GDR, they founded the renowned Ostkreuz Agency. For decades, each had assisted the other whenever one “had a job,” yet it was only with their self-initiated project Monalisen der Vorstädte that their collaboration evolved into a true joint undertaking—and thus into a new form of working together.