Ute Mahler is one of the leading contemporary photographers. Her early artistic work is closely linked to the GDR fashion and culture magazine ‘Sibylle’, although Mahler’s fashion photographs cannot be separated from the portraits, which, alongside the clothing, have always been a defining element of her images. Women and their portrayal in society remain the focus of her photographic interest to this day. The exhibition, organised in collaboration with Galerie Pankow, Berlin, features photographs taken from 1975 onwards for the magazine “Sibylle”, as well as the photo essay that appeared in the FAZ magazine in 2020.
To accompany the exhibition, Hartmann Books has published a book comprising approximately 290 pages and 200 illustrations, along with texts by Annett Gröschner, Ute Mahler and Johanna Eckhardt.
Ute Mahler, born in Berka in 1949, completed her studies in photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig in 1974 and has been working as a freelance photographer ever since. In 1990, she founded the renowned OSTKREUZ – Agency for Photographers together with six East German photographers. Since 2005, she has been a lecturer at the Ostkreuz School of Photography in Berlin and held a professorship in photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg from 2000 to 2015. Since 2008, she has been photographing jointly with her husband, Werner Mahler, under a shared authorship. In their joint long-term projects, they explore current political, social and personal issues.