Ute Mahler

Ute Mahler (née Schirmer; born 1949) is a German photographer. In 1990 she and her husband Werner Mahler were two of the seven co-founders of the "Ostkreuz" photography agency. Between 2000 and 2015, she was a professor of photography at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. Ute Schirmer was born in Berka (Sondershausen) in the countryside north of Erfurt (Thuringia) and west of Leipzig. Her birth came three weeks after the region administered as the Soviet occupation zone was rebranded and relaunched as the Soviet sponsored German Democratic Republic (East Germany). It was in the German Democratic Republic that Schirmer grew up and, for nearly two decades, built a successful career as a photographer. Many of the well judged photographs, mainly of people, for which she is celebrated today were produced during that period, in the full knowledge that there was very little likelihood that they would ever be seen by anyone other than the photographer and her friends. In East Germany she would be known to the public primarily as a fashion photographer. After her father's death in 2001 Ute Mahler found hundreds of photo-negatives that he had hidden away in the attic. These were his "personal unofficial photographs". In 2003 she arranged for a selection from the 1950s to be published. "My father never received any training [in photography] but he was incredibly talented ... yet he placed no value on these honest authentic pictures. He thought that his carefully staged publicity images were more important." Ute Mahler interviewed by Rory MacLean in 2010 Ludwig Schirmer (1929–2001), her father, had recently qualified as a miller and at the time of her birth worked in the village mill. He was also a passionate and talented amateur photographer, taking pictures of family and friends, weddings and other celebrations in the village. When Ute was around twelve everything changed, as he relocated the family to Lehnitz and, in 1961 opened a photographic studio in nearby Berlin.