Ute Mahler, Werner Mahler, Ludwig Shirmer: Ein Dorf 1950-2022

This book is a different kind of travelogue. While reading, the viewer travels through time and stays in the same place, Berka a small village in Thuringia, Germany. The village was photographed by three photographers of one family over 70 years - between 1950 and 2022. This unusal project - the result of several coincidences - tells us a lot about the country, the village, its people and how things have developed so far... Coincidence: The master miller of Berka, Ludwig Schirmer, is an enthusiastic amateur photographer who, after the Second World War, in addition to his work as a miller, still finds time to capture life in the village and in the fields in pictures that are reminiscent of other great German photographers of his time. Coincidence: In 1950, the Schirmer family has a daughter, Ute, who spends her childhood in Berka. Coincidence: Ute marries Werner in 1973, whom she meets at grammar school in Oranienburg. Both later study at the HGB Leipzig and Werner graduates in 1977/78 with a diploma on Ute’s home village, Berka. Coincidence: In 1997, Werner is commissioned by STERN to photograph the ＂flourishing Landscapes＂ promised by Helmut Kohl and in 1998 he returned to Berka to photograph again. In 2001, Ludwig Schirmer dies. He had become one of the GDR’s best-known advertising photographers in the 1960. In his estate a few prints and many negatives of his Berka pictures turn up. Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler make first prints in their darkroom and realize the artistic and documentary quality of these pictures. 2021/2022, no further coincidence: Ute Mahler repeatedly travels to Berka and takes portraits of the young people in the village who were not even born when Werner Mahler last photographed there. They are the great-granddaughters or great-great-granddaughters of the people Ludwig Schirmer knew and portrayed in the 1950s. 2022/2023, the long-term project, photographed entirely in analog and black and white, has been completed and the idea for the book, which has been maturing for several years, is beginning to take shape. The writer Jenny Erpenbeck, the journalist and friend Anja Maier, the sociologist Steffen Mau (Humboldt University Berlin) and the American photo historian Gary Van Zante (MIT, Boston) describe the place, the time, the people, the photographers and the photographs. Graphic designer Florian Lamm uses subtle design ideas to develop a complex layout that shapes images and texts into a dense grand narrative reminiscent of great literary, photographic and cinematic role models and now in 2024, curious viewers, readers and reviewers can discover the many references by coincidence (or not)!

Ute Mahler completed her studies in photography at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig in 1974 and has worked as a freelance photographer ever since. She was a member of the Association of Visual Artists/Verband Bildender Künstler (VBK) from 1981 and founded the renowned OSTKREUZ - Agency of Photographers with six East German photographers in 1990. Since 2005, she has been a lecturer at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie in Berlin and held a professorship in photography at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg from 2000 to 2015. Before the fall of the Berlin Wall, her work was published in the GDR fashion magazine Sibylle, among others, and from 1989 she worked for national and international magazines. She has always pursued her own artistic projects (in addition to commissioned work and later teaching), since 2008 also together with her husband, the photographer Werner Mahler. Ute Mahler’s work has been presented in numerous exhibitions worldwide, including the Haus der Photographie in Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen, dedicating a large exhibition to the Mahlers work in 2014, which was shown enlarged in 2019 at the Fotomuseum Den Haag/Netherlands (＂Beyond the Borders of the GDR＂). The photographer has received numerous awards for her work; together with Werner Mahler, she received the Lotto Brandenburg Art Prize for Photography in 2011 and the German Photography Book Prize for the comprehensive publication ＂Werkschau＂ in 2015. In 2019, the Art Directors Club awarded Ute Mahler and Werner Mahler the ADC Silver Nail for their photography booklet ＂Deutsche Kleinstädte＂ (＂Small German Towns＂) by Zeitmagazin. In the same year, the Mahlers were awarded the David Octavius Hill Medal by the German Photographic Academy. In 2013, Ute Mahler, together with 17 colleagues from the OSTKREUZ agency, received the Konrad Wolf Prize of the Academy of Arts for outstanding artistic achievement.